The boring end of SaaS
"The end of SaaS." I've been hearing this for two years now. The price of writing software has collapsed, so why would anyone pay for a generic tool when they can have their own. Tailored (literally) to how they work, with no subscription attached?
I keep changing my mind about it.
Some days I'm certain. Why would any company pay for software that does things in a way that doesn't fit their actual process, that people need to adapt to and not the other way around? The economics that used to justify it are gone. Other days I look at how slowly companies actually change. How much momentum and habit and risk-aversion sits inside every tooling decision. Then I'm certain of the opposite.
AI brought genuine disruption, and disruption makes us reach for extreme predictions first. SaaS is dead. Everyone will build everything. The reality is going to be more subtle, more boring than that. Most likely, two things happen in parallel. Both driven by the same cause: writing software got dramatically cheaper.
Stream one: extreme customization
There have always been companies that ran the math on SaaS versus custom and chose custom. What changed is where the break-even sits. It's not just the subscription cost. It's the cost of running a suboptimal process because your tool doesn't support the way you actually work. That second cost is usually the bigger one, and it never shows up on an invoice.
Imagine every company running its own CRM. Maybe built around a shared core, but genuinely built for them. Wait, I don't mean "customized" through configuration screens or anything like that. I mean really: built for them. That's a mindset shift, not a feature comparison. And the economics now allow it.
Stream two: affordable software
One day I was reviewing our SaaS bill and stopped at one line: Jira Service Desk, around €4,000 a year. We used it for one thing: giving customers a portal to report tickets. The pricing made no sense next to regular Jira, and I'm sure it's full of features we never touched.
So we built our own service desk. This was software we'd relied on for eight years. Now completely replaced, in two months.
Here's the thing about SaaS pricing: growth mindset runs subscriptions up. Product teams keep shipping features, companies keep chasing expansion revenue, and the price follows — whether or not you need any of it.
With AI, we should expect the opposite force. Small, skilled teams will build focused copies of existing SaaS. Equally good. Or maybe simpler and better at one thing. But at dramatically lower cost. The reason this didn't happen before is that the entry cost was too high. It isn't anymore.
By the way: after the service desk, we replaced Jira itself. Another €2,000 a year. Sorry, Atlassian.
The boring conclusion
So no, I don't think SaaS ends. I think it splits. Companies with specific workflows will increasingly own their software, because tailored finally beats generic on price. And the SaaS that survives will face real competition from affordable challengers, because the moat of expensive initial development is gone.
Neither stream is dramatic. Both are already happening. The interesting work is knowing which side of the split a given tool belongs on. And running that math before the next renewal.
