Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together.

I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".

Slight tangent: what’s the deal with the weird ligatures on that page in the headings?

Be a System of Record, not just a Wrapper™ is excellent advice.

here's the secret saas can vibe code features too on top of their paid well developed and secured api. they can get off their ass and vibe code a mcp wrapper, so user can use the ai tooling they pay for to interact with their saas. and they'd be called visionary hero of the agentic revolution.

but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.

I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.

"biased" and "impartial" are antonyms. Pick one or the other.

Well it definitely killed mine so I can't say this is not true

I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition

Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies with questionable long-term businesses who are getting hit, but that was bound to happen.