What web businesses will continue to make money post AI?

More than 90% for web business will continue to make money.

We are a team of 4 people company and we use 15+ SaaS Web tools and we can code few of them but we see no reason to solve. Why would we replace Calendly already at just $12 per month? Or why would we will create an internal Outlook?

Been thinking about this a lot myself.

My current answer: go vertical and messy.

Ex, Healthcare portals with ugly data. Compliance platforms with painful regulations. B2B tools with 6-month sales cycles.

Niche business tools. Ones that solve specific problems or improve workflows unique to industries. I think this is a going to be interesting because you will have a ton of industry SMEs who now can just ask an AI to build them a tool to solve a unique problem they've seen throughout their career and start a business on it (hopefully). I know someone doing this exact thing, and it seems to be working so far.

Most B2B SAAS is not going to go to zero just because of AI. B2B Customers don't want to build their own tools generally unless it is their core business. Before AI, customers used to hire developers/vendors to solve a problem. After AI, customers will continue to do the same. They may ask about doing things with AI, sure.

Source: I sell a complex B2B SAAS and even though customers are open to learning more about using AI and are curious, I never had a customer ask so far "Hey so now this AI thing is out, do I really need to you the $xx,xxxx/Year because I can build this in a weekend now, right?". The software is just 1 thing. Customers want stability, support, maintenance, someone to call if shit breaks and if a SAAS vendor does a decent job at it, they won't leave.

If anything, customers who are AI adaptors are asking to collaborate with their existing vendors if possible.

All of the major SaaS companies. No company wants to maintain a vibe coded in house SaaS product anymore than they wanted to maintain a Microsoft Access app. AI is a “sustaining innovation” for existing companies.

Any business that already has a network effect of services and the data that will thrive on even more AI content.

Meta (Instagram, Threads), Bloomberg, X, YouTube, Snap, Netflix, TikTok, Valve.

Coding agents are not designed to clone network effects nor can they.

Any business that solves a problem. The tech is always a commodity. The valuable parts are usually the data, the services offered, etc. and they have good distribution which makes their moat strong.

Thousands of decisions go into building a large SaaS product. Beyond that, it requires infrastructure and maintenance to run it. This can and will break. Even with AI, all of this does not become trivial.

Most companies want to focus on their actual business, which is why they go to SaaS in the first place. They won’t want to do all this stuff themselves, as it’s a distraction from the core business, and they won’t do it as well as people dedicated to building a SaaS product.

AI is not killing SaaS, there is no real proof for that. No one wants to host, maintain, and be liable for shit other people can do better for less money. You share R&D costs with other customers. It's more efficient.

This take is so unimaginably stupid and far from the truth it makes me angry. You have network effects, liability, maintenance, mental/managerial complexity, integrations and on and on the list goes. I would be weary of anyone proposing an issue and selling you the solution right with it.

You can also cook your own food. But do you? Do you break your own bread? Do you make your own pasta? No you don't. You pay for an outcome. SaaS is the same. Just because you can do it yourself doesn't mean you should. The code is the smallest part of a SaaS. This will be the same thing like "let's move devs to a cheaper country". Look how that turned out.

Do you all still agree that SaaS is going to be fine?

FIRESHIP: 7 AI updates breaking SaaS right now... https://youtu.be/cxcb55zr2Q8?si=D0OUeejL0d0SkXJZ

Please code me a Microsoft excel with Claude Code.

Nobody knows

Some hypotheses

(A) AI helps most setup simple tools - even non technical people. But once you get beyond greenfield the cognitive debt builds so you can’t reason about it it. It’s possible mature products don’t get the same gains with AI (or have different types of productivity gains).

(B) We pay a SaaS company to be responsible for an SLA. I personally don’t want to be responsible for that SLA on my vibe coded app so I outsource it. See also support, etc

(C) We pay SaaS to be a reliable source of truth (like Shopify for my Ecom business). The app holds the state of something important. That investment in the ecosystem is itself a moat.

(D) Many “SaaS” businesses are not pure software. They handle payment, benefits, payroll. Often with complex human b2b backends. It looks like just software to us, but we pay to turn a complex set of human relationships into a slick dashboard.

If my business is a pure software tool, it doesn’t have a good moat - and frankly probably nevet did.

Not many. The future is self-hosted applications and organization owned/retained data.