The vibe coding trap

There's a popular narrative on social media right now that AI can build software so quickly and cheaply that SaaS is dead (or will be soon).

Why pay for Linear when AI can build a project tracker in an afternoon? Why pay Stripe $30k/year when you can vibe code your own billing system in a weekend? The cost of building software has collapsed to near zero, therefore the value of selling software has collapsed to near zero. QED, SaaS is dead.

This sounds right, but it’s not. It confuses the cost of building software with the cost of owning software. These are very different things.

That weekend you spent vibe coding a billing system? Congratulations, you now own a billing system. Here is a (partial) list of things you also now own:

• You own the tax compliance updates when VAT rules change in the EU

• You own the PCI audit conversation when your enterprise lead asks who maintains your payment infrastructure

• You own the bug where a customer in Turkey got charged 1,000,000 times too much because you didn't know about their latest currency redenomination

Every single one of those things will happen. They are the normal operating reality of running software that touches money, customers, data, or really anything that matters.

Most of our team at @Basedash works out of a WeWork. Not because we can’t afford our own office, but because it’s a huge PITA to manage. You need to hire cleaners, deal with fire tests, and fix the roof when it leaks. We just want to build software, not manage a building.

The "SaaS is dead" narrative falls into the same trap. You're free from the vendor! You control your own destiny! But ownership of software is not an asset. It’s a liability.

SaaS is commercial real estate for software. You think you're paying for the code. You’re not. You're paying for the operational surface area that you now don't have to think about. After all, the “S” in SaaS stands for “service”.

As AI makes engineers more productive, the value of each engineering hour goes up, not down. If your engineers can ship 5x more product per hour, every hour they spend maintaining your internal admin panel or debugging your homegrown BI platform is 5x more expensive than it used to be. The more productive AI makes your team, the more costly it becomes to waste their time on undifferentiated internal software.

This is the vibe coding trap. It makes going from 0 to 1 cheaper but 1 to ∞ much more expensive.

None of this means that the SaaS industry isn’t going to change. Something is happening, but it's not the death of SaaS. It's the death of bad SaaS.

For years, you could build a mediocre product in an uncrowded category and charge for it simply because the cost of building an alternative was high. Those days are gone. If your product is a thin wrapper around a CRUD database with a nice UI, you are indeed in trouble.

The SaaS products that will thrive are the ones where the gap between MVP and “actually good product” is enormous. Stripe. WorkOS. Cloudflare. These products aren't valuable because they're hard to build. They're valuable because they're hard to own. They need to accumulate thousands of correct product decisions, maintain operational excellence, evolve with a changing ecosystem, and to do all of that continuously, forever.

No pressure.