However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.
You'd be surprised how many industries are just not that tech-savvy. Your average real estate company or accounting firm doesn't have the expertise to build even the simplest apps, and a keen employee vibe coding a CRUD app at a non-tech company is only 20% of the problem. Where are they hosting the CRUD app? How are they getting alerted when the CRUD app goes down, or when it starts spitting 500s? Who's handling database and OS upgrades for the server hosting the web app? These may sound like simple things to you and I, but to a company with zero expertise, the first time their database goes down and they (and ChatGPT) can't figure out why, they get spooked. If these companies wanted to avoid paying SaaS they'd be better off using Excel.
I started my career in consulting and it was filled with cases like this, even pre-AI, where a non-tech company built some kind of internal tool, it got too unwieldy because it was coded like shit by people with minimal development experience, and they ended up outsourcing hosting and maintenance because it was too difficult and they had no interest in building a software department.
They’re also getting quite good at fixing 500 errors at the speed of a prompt, which is faster than humans
IME development speed is a very minor factor in the success of a vertical SaaS. Vertical niches exist because they are experts in something other than software, and understand it's worth paying for their problems to be solved. Typically, subscriptions of successful software businesses are priced based on outcome/value, not the cost of development.
I for one have found myself happily spending hundreds of dollars trying to build things I struggled to do in the past. And I am happy to keep things open source because I know the code is no longer the moat.
As an example, I started this almost 10 years ago:
https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper
I the past 4 days I have added more functionality to it that I ever did in all the time before.
Assuming this comes from lower barriers of entry to software engineering skills at scale with LLMs, this is still begs the question: Who will pay for the tokens? One thing is giving away your free time for passion, other one is giving away money.
Maybe we'll see a future were people crowdsource projects supporting them directly via donations for tokens/LLM queries.
I built a CapRover clone that’s actually free software for <$1k. I imagine it wouldn’t be much more to modify a fork of Mattermost to add in their pay-gated features like SSO and message expiry etc.
Is this perhaps happening today? Large open source projects where llm could deliver the code.. e.g. I want an home assistant to connect to something that perhaps isn't mainstream but used by a dozen users. Those dozen users fund the PR via token budget?
The same can be said of your time, but here we're talking about scale benefits due to LLMs (i.e. lots of SaaSs dying due to lots of "full featured f/oss projects").
