HACKER Q&A
📣 spenceXu

If Everyone Can "Build" a SaaS, What Becomes Valuable?


The narrative is shifting: from “no-code” to prompts that generate full-stack apps. Reports suggest the future may belong to “Agent Platform Companies” with usage-based pricing, not traditional seat-licensed SaaS .

This leads to a two-part question:

Future of SaaS: If custom, “good enough” software becomes trivial to create for specific needs, does the traditional SaaS model collapse? Will value shift entirely to AI platforms and infrastructure, with most SaaS becoming commodities?

The New “Valuable Thing”: In a democratized creation world (like TikTok for video), what becomes the scarce asset? Is it distribution, vertical-specific data/models, or integration & trust? What would the “App Store” for these AI-generated micro-SaaS look like?

Looking for perspectives from builders, investors, and SaaS users.

  👤 rvz Accepted Answer ✓
> Will value shift entirely to AI platforms and infrastructure, with most SaaS becoming commodities?

At some point AI platforms will struggle to monetize at the model API layer due to local models catching up. This is why the model providers are focused on AI model integrations at the application layer which invades traditional SaaS companies.

You now need to think very carefully about 'what' to build and assume that someone with a AI agent can clone your SaaS and race you to $0 as a risk.

👤 rektlessness
It is a bit weird watching the industry pivot from ‘no-code’ to AI agents. But to be honest, i think if a prompt can knock out a bespoke app in five minutes, the traditional SaaS model is going to be as relevant as a fax machine, leaving the real value in whomever owns the pipes and the trust to actually run the stuff, and maintain it, once we've pivoted to the next shiny paradigm shift.
👤 kentich
Neural networks are not the magic wand that will create a high-quality app for you.
👤 farseer
Large software platforms with their own ecosystems will be spared this fate. Mostly because AI can only create small and trivial apps and further model improvement in context size or otherwise may not be forthcoming so easily.

So large software platforms, think Jira/Confluence, MS Teams, SAP etc are not affected. But AI will definitely eat the solo dev SaaS, especially those handling trivial use cases.

👤 sangkwun
When building becomes easy, curation becomes the moat.

Anyone can spin up a SaaS now, but knowing what information actually matters to a specific audience is still hard to replicate. That's domain expertise, not technical skill.

I think the value is shifting from "can you build it" to "can you filter the noise." The bottleneck isn't access to information anymore - it's attention.