Ask HN: Are SaaS businesses going to zero?

At the moment, the economics of software are out of whack. It's not about agentic replacing traditional painstakingly coded applications, but more about the massive influx of capital, and the subsidies from the newcomers to try and gain ground and demonstrate aggressive growth. In the early 2000's, Facebook's growth was described as "selling dollar bills for 90 cents." That is where we are now. Nobody will know for sure where all this lands until companies have to demonstrate their worth through real profits and stable growth.

Personally, I think this is the trend we'll see.

AI doesn't mean everyone will build their own software, at least not in the next 5-10 years. It means the unit economics have completely changed.

If you're charging $100/seat - you need to completely refactor your business. We might see the end of the $1 million+/yr enterprise software contracts.

The bigger shift might be pricing moving closer to actual usage/value instead of traditional per-seat SaaS pricing.

Yes. Probably not free, but yea, whatever it costs to keep the agents running to keep the lights on.

people are tightening their belts. Sadly for SaaS, you can't eat software, and neither can it keep you dry and warm.

Most will go to zero.

could be anything: competition is better now and legacy app looks outdated / less desirable, studios are having hard time and saving money, etc

Wait until token based pricing. And then the open AI / antropic IPO (This will be the top).

ya that's crazy

claude