Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

Posted by Adrig 12 hours ago

5171Original

Comments

Comment by skiing_crawling 12 hours ago

This has that weird "AI written" sentence structure.

Comment by cadamsdotcom 8 hours ago

It also says a lot of right things in just the right way at just the right time.

If you miss the message, one less person to compete with.

Comment by halJordan 8 hours ago

We get it. You're one of gods chosen, who alone can recognize ai. Thank you for your beloved beneficence.

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Fable helped me edit since I'm not a native English speaker, so I might not catch these subtleties. Thought and structure are my own

Comment by jerf 11 hours ago

A general question for HN: Are there any translation services that I can recommend that people use instead just asking a standard AI to translate in the naive way? I'm saddened by the number of times I'm seeing non-native speakers get tarred with using an AI because the naive way an LLM translates slathers its own style on top of the translation rather than being a more faithful translation.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

Standard translation services lack the understanding of LLMs and LLMs are hilariously prone to these AI tells, even when you ask to avoid them.

I try to learn writing and copywriting directly in english to avoid the awkward translation effect, but I focus more on the rythm, structure and content than the prasing itself

Comment by em-bee 8 hours ago

i believe that the big ones, bing, google, even deepl are all using AI to translate. the variation and the mistranslations i sometimes get are to wild.

i wish the translation tool would tell me if it can't directly translate a word because of misspellings or abbreviations. i learned that i have to write in a very explicit straight forward way, with each sentence standing on its own to make sure i get sensible translations.

Comment by ornornor 10 hours ago

DeepL is pretty decent.

Comment by bbg2401 9 hours ago

> because the naive way an LLM translates slathers its own style on top of the translation rather than being a more faithful translation.

If you're sincere then I'm afraid you're being led on by the lazy.

When tasked with translating a document, unless instructed otherwise, the LLM does not inject its own cliched stories, narrative structures and assorted engagement tricks.

Comment by isodev 10 hours ago

It’s very difficult to read. It would’ve been better for you to just write it in your native language

Comment by mattm 11 hours ago

> I built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for.

It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

> Whatever niche tool you’re sketching this week, a thousand people can prompt a working version by Sunday night

A lot of people on HN are naturally builders. For them it's fun to play around with AI and see what can be built. Not everyone is like that.

For individuals, how many people actually want to spend their weekends building a niche tool for themselves vs just paying a few dollars a month to access something that does the job even though it may not be perfect?

For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally, there will be people with feature requests for it. Before you know it, the company is diverting resources away from their core business for a support tool that doesn't really drive impact.

I think we'll see more options in the marketplace as individuals will be able to get started more easily but SaaS is far from dead.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

> Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

100%, which is why I think hyper-tailored, small software is an exciting option. When you shift your goal to serve 1000 customers, the hardest part is not having a tech stack that supports them, but making sure the software is good enough for all their different needs. Or you try to meet them all and you get into feature creep.

> For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally

What if you neither buy or build the software but buy the service outcome?

A data analyst that creates custom workflows with auto-generated dashboards. A dev-ops that provides access with exactly the information you need, depending on the hand-off level you want for the process.

My point is that a lot of these micro tools that started to appear the last few years will vanish, either bundled with bigger SAAS, internalized, or shifted to a service offering. This trend started with productized services, this is the next step.

> SaaS is far from dead.

Micro SAAS*. I agree with all your points, but I do believe the small software landscape will change drastically in the coming years

Comment by sandcat_ 10 hours ago

This is just the old argument in favour of SaaS, though. The article is pointing out that those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.

At my job (we're somewhere in the transition between startup -> enterprise), we still use a lot of SaaS and are continuing to do so, but even there we're starting to move off certain platforms (Pendo, is a recent casualty) as we've realized in many cases we can just build it ourselves, pay drastically less, and actually get to control how it all works.

My suspicion, though I could be wrong: SaaS will move more and more towards focusing solely on the enterprise. Personal users and startups will have a harder time justifying both the cost and lack of flexibility of pure software SaaS. Enterprise will continue to be ok with paying the costs in exchange for compliance and vendor stuff and integration and whatever else they care about.

Comment by gls2ro 1 hour ago

Even if maintainance is just a Claude/ChatGPT session away we know that the cost of that session could be 1-2 hours of attention going to a supporting tool. And what if suddently is down? now your software team is having an incident about an in house tool instead if an incident about your paying customers.

Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.

Comment by codethief 8 hours ago

> those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.

…as are your own, perfectly custom security vulnerabilities and their successful exploitations.

Comment by cpill 10 hours ago

I think small, ma and pa businesses who don't know anything about software engineering will still need support.

Comment by willio58 10 hours ago

> It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

Fully agreed. It's also just a time saver. People are lazy, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just that people don't really want to sit there and explain to an agent exactly what they want software to function like. In fact, most people don't even actually know what they want software to function like.

It doesn't just stop at humans either. When I recently started creating my smart budgeting app, Claude pointed me to use Clerk for auth. So not even the AI wants to build everything from scratch.

Comment by cadamsdotcom 8 hours ago

To be fair to Claude on the Clerk thing, I had my agent build session management and auth from scratch, then beefed it up with all the best practice advice, and and and.

It took me an extra day of agent-prodding and code review.

And I still will have to add SSO and Google/whoever sign-in and passkeys and 2FA at some point.

Using Clerk would've avoided that, but at a permanent cost of one more dependency.

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by tahoemph999 10 hours ago

Before the industrial revolution or so somebody coming up in a craft would build a chunk of their toolset as part of that process. Even today many good (not necessarily software) engineers build some of their own tools. AI has made it much easier to build tooling to make your life better. Maybe some could be sold. But that isn't the intent and, as others have noted, can take significant additional effort.

I have my own "bandsintown" for example because I want to avoid the advertisement shitshow. I have a number of very specific tools for building software. I doubt I ever package up any of this for use by others much less try to monetize it.

That is the vibe I got from this article. This is a good concept to have in your (meta) toolbelt.

Comment by khasan222 11 hours ago

Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features.

My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable.

That to me is a ripe market to be overtaken. What it really needs is a taxi driver or operator so fed up with the current system they spend their energy organizing and making their own uber with less greed.

For sure not every tool will become huge, but most of the tools we use nowadays started with someone having a problem, being frustrated with the status quo, and having the will and means to execute.

The means necessary to execute get lower and lower everyday.

Comment by JackSlateur 9 hours ago

Bad example: uber is not a saas at all

It's a network.

Comment by khasan222 6 hours ago

Isn’t it saas that facilitates a network with a specific goal in mind?

Comment by owebmaster 3 hours ago

Uber is literally a software as a transport service

Comment by pydry 11 hours ago

From what ive seen we see no more features and quality is getting worse.

OP is ascribing magical powers to AI which it does not have. sure, it can replace a shitty poorly coded todo app. but nobody wanted that anyway.

Comment by khasan222 6 hours ago

I think people will get way better at wrangling code with ai as time passes

Comment by soulchild37 12 hours ago

> Senior interface designer > The website fails accessibility color contrast

Comment by echoangle 11 hours ago

> Senior interface designer > if you click on the website, it sends out pixelated ripples over the whole screen

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Text is WCAG AAA?

Comment by evilduck 11 hours ago

Chrome's built in Lighthouse scoring fails your site on lacking sufficient contrast.

Subjectively, even without vision problems, I strongly dislike your choice also.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

Thanks for the feedback. I wonder which system they use, WCAG is notoriously limited so I often use APCA and both cleared this combo

Comment by layer8 11 hours ago

While that’s true, it’s still uncomfortable and hard to read, so I don’t know what WCAG is smoking: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=202958&...

Comment by jaggederest 11 hours ago

Thus demonstrating that the final accessibility gate must be "the mark I human eyeball". Looks impossible to read without reader mode on my screen.

Your "paper" choice is #bfbfc4 - even going to #ddd makes the APCA go from ~63 to 80 and would probably address the complaints handily. WCAG has a lot of gaps.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

But human eyeballs can vary wildly, hence the need for tools. I'm the kind of person who uses the sepia mode for reading, so I didn't expect such strong discomfort from readers. This feedback surfaced a lot here, so it was a blind spot on my part.

Anyway, did a quick fix, should be enough for now

Comment by jaggederest 10 hours ago

I actually have a panel that I've collected over time, starting with a former coworker who was visually impaired, and I am now thinking it should be some kind of users-signup-and-give-feedback system, some sort of statistical sampling of a few people across the accessibility needs spectrum.

Comment by hoppp 11 hours ago

He can design good looking interfaces, just not accessible ones I guess.

I mean the website does look good, it's just hard to read.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by ef2k 11 hours ago

I don't know if it's a coincidence but this is the same thing an AI explained to me when prompted something like "what replaces SaaS now that AI can build most things on demand". That was like a year ago. I have no proof for this, but we might all just be getting similar responses from similar contextual bubbles and landing on the same conclusions.

Comment by chenster 12 hours ago

Great post except that light grayish blue background is killing my eyes.

Comment by nchmy 11 hours ago

yeah, strange given that the article is about design systems...

Comment by sltr 8 hours ago

Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be.

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

Comment by em-bee 7 hours ago

or his success depends on his perceived confidence. meaning that maybe he is scared, but doesn't want to show it because it would make it worse.

care to share some key takeaways? not really keen on listening to a half hour audio.

Comment by sltr 6 hours ago

Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.

The episode was worth my time.

Comment by Adrig 6 hours ago

Oh I love Rob, didn't catch this episode, thanks for sharing

Comment by rkuodys 10 hours ago

I expect full circle on this one. Short term - many enthusiasts build stuff. I can fully imagine someone in a given company creating something over the weekend and persuading manager to adopt the system. However, 6 months pass, the person now moved into new role or left a company, nobody knows the product and it becomes just another SaaS just without working support behind it. So for short term it is definitely bring some losses. Long term I think it will bite those who dropped the software. Over-customisation for the needs of everyone is probably here to stay in my opinion

Comment by em-bee 8 hours ago

if it was built with AI then the knowledge of the builder is not really adding much. the next person coming in to fix issues is just going to feed the thing into an AI too, and ask the AI to fix the problem they have.

Comment by whinvik 10 hours ago

I kind of get what the article is saying. But I am looking at it from a different perspective.

The same set of things like skills, and custom tools etc can actually be used to get faster to the a product that kind of fits 1000 customers. But the change is that one can build even more custom things for some customers with those skills and tools.

Last year I built a custom integration for a customer in 2 weeks. Now I can probably do it in 2 days. What does that mean for the future, I have no idea, but surely getting custom solutions like this would be more of a moat not less.

Comment by fraywing 11 hours ago

Adding to the topic rather than dog piling onto the website critique:

I think "the context" the author defines also includes harder to unlock peripheral components that makes software products in 2026 defensible.

For example, security is getting harder not easier. Enterprise trust rides on needing to have up-to-date knowledge on data regulation as well.

Relationships, brand maturity, discovery; all of that becomes rarified as we continue to reduce the actual product launch curve -- but also the "harder to do" hygiene stuff that takes you from a "I vibe coded this in two days, good luck" to a "your successful company can count on us" type of hardening has become progressively more of a baseline requirement.

Comment by Multicomp 11 hours ago

In a way, this new dynamic of 'everyone can code' reminds me of the Unbundling -> Bundling -> Unbundling cycle of how entertainment media went from 3 broadcast channels to cable channels to web videos to our current state of bundled streaming services, with no end in sight.

Not to forget DVD shipping eras (Sony should not discontinue physical game sales, someone needs to get us silicon/holographic/terabyte recording media already), the focus is on the bundling/unbundling of software making. Slack + Salesforce vs 'we vibed our own chat and CRM just for us'...aka a Neo-SAP ERP program.

It's a cambrian explosion of software where lots are going to learn in realtime that the code was never the value of a software engineer / software, the value is in the shared understanding of an information system or workflow or business value stream, that parts of which happen to run through digital information systems.

By the time AI is done with us, its market effects mean in order to stay employable/added value beyond just widget-watchers, we will all be business strategy experts, or we will be algorithm-fed-doped-up mindless beasts, Morlocks vs Eloi, not because of AI itself, but because of the current rapaciousness of business leaders and an assumed trajectory where society doesn't adapt to social movements and actions now made possible by the existence of LLMs.

Sidneote: the LLMs themselves are not IMO going to achieve AGI any time soon. There might be a compilation of disparate systems and LLMs form part of 'tissues' of an eventual AGI, but not currently.

Comment by Terr_ 10 hours ago

> Morlocks vs Eloi

We will either be experts in asbestos chemistry, safety mechanisms, and remediation... or we'll be helping people tweak it for sale as kitchen sponges and pinatas.

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Definitely. I wonder if this will be an increasing factor when choosing vendors. Will the security risk drive companies away from small software, due to their use of AI? Will we see a bundling of features in big established vendors?

Will they invest more into in-house security? (Doubting the last one).

For small apps used to deliver a service in my examples, I believe the risk surface is way narrower, which might make it more acceptable. For better of for worse

Comment by mariopt 9 hours ago

I don't buy it, this is essentially vibe-consulting.

Deal with one customer can be quite a nightmare, and honestly, sometimes using off the shelf solutions can result in saving time and money.

Even today I'm creating SaaS, not every problem is simple to solve. Take a look at CRMs, there are thousands of CRMs due to enormous egos wanting to build "my way", "the way", "the superior way", "our company is not like others (LOL)", etc. At the end of the day it's just a database with CRUDish UI.

My customers pay me to solve their problem well because they can not solve it themselves, when they do they just don't have the time.

Reality check: I have been coding many products with all frontiers models: Still takes a lot of time and, surprise surprise!, money for tokens. Ironically software development became more expensive for serious software that won't vibe-break/vibe-delete-prod/vibe-delete-database.

Comment by MattPerry 11 hours ago

All of the comments about the color contrast and mouse click action caused this site to change while I was reading.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

Haha sorry about that. I made the changes quickly since a lot of people were reading, and I wanted people to focus on the content

Comment by hoppp 11 hours ago

"Built a SaaS in a few hours" Yeah, okay so why would anyone buy it? They can build the same in a few hours.

Comment by nchmy 11 hours ago

this is quite literally the point of the article...

Comment by hoppp 11 hours ago

I didn't read all because the background hurts my eyes.

Comment by worldthruword 11 hours ago

You can ask AI to read it. I do the same with HN comments as well.

Comment by risyachka 10 hours ago

>> Because AI is crushing small standalone software

The only thing AI is crushing is newcomers.

Standalone software has expertise and distribution, the only 2 things that matter and that your new software does not have.

Also the needs of a business have nothing to do with software you vibe code for yourself. Its compliance, backups, reliability. Not a few features claude did for you.

Comment by actionfromafar 11 hours ago

This feels a bit like motivated reasoning to me. This little tool of yours could instead be a seed you build around. Do you have access to a market? Yes? You are in a better position than ten thousand other vibe coders with a similar idea. No? If you have the stamina to pursue a market, you have more stamina than thousands of vibe coders who will just give up.

Another way to say the same thing is that many (not all, of course) SAAS were already service with a software, especially when starting out.

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Possibly.. I admit I'm quite bad with distribution, hence why I usually work with a few clients long-term.

But we do see a sharp rise in the release of apps, without the same tendency in use. [1]

I do think there will be a place for SAAS, even micro-SAAS, but the competition will be fierce and I don't have a lot of hope for indiehacker without any "unfair advantages" like unique knowledge, data, network, etc

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ericseufert_this-ft-chart-vis...

Comment by lekevicius 12 hours ago

Unrelated, but since I see that the author posted this to HN: for a reader like me who likes to select text / fidget with mouse clicks as I read, this website is a nightmare.

Comment by swiftcoder 11 hours ago

I don't know, I feel like my OCD clicking has finally been rewarded appropriately. Usually it just results in navigating to weird places via links that are hidden in the formatting. But this time it was delightful! And I was rewarded with a game!

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Glad to see I'm not alone! I removed it from the articles pages, but you can still go wild on the index page. BTW my high score is 1626

Comment by djoldman 11 hours ago

You might want to try what I do: run JS in allowlist mode:

https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher

By default, I don't run into these problems and save a lot of compute!

Comment by sss111 11 hours ago

I actually like the creativity

Comment by Adrig 11 hours ago

Yeah my bad, this is a fun effect for the landing, didn't think much of it when publishing the first article, fixing now, thanks for feedback!

Comment by sodapopcan 10 hours ago

Has it been fixed? What was the effect, I'm so curious now.

Comment by Adrig 10 hours ago

Yes, disabled on the heavy text pages, still present on the home page!

Comment by sodapopcan 9 hours ago

Oh, haha! I actually love shit like this, but ya, not in a blog as I'm also a mouse-fidgetter. You could tone activating it down a bit by only activating it on a quick click and not at all if there is selected text [/END advice-no-one-asked-me-for]