zlacker

>>jnord+(OP)
I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams.

I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.

>>andy_p+b8
This is only true if you assume that you are producing the same amount of code as today. Though, AI ultimately will produce more code which will require higher maintenance. Your internal team will need to scale up due to the the amount of code they need to maintain. Your security team will have more work to do as well because they will need to review more code which will require scaling that team as well. Your infrastructure costs will start adding up and if you have any DevOps they will need scaling too.

Soon or later the CTO will be dictating which projects can be vibe coded which ones make sense to buy.

SaaS benefits from network effects - your internal tools don't. So overall SaaS is cheaper.

The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs. Most of it is salaries. The situation you are describing the kind of dead spiral many companies will get into and that will be their downfall not salvation.

>>_pdp_+ab
> The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs

Yes and no. If someone is controlling the SaaS selection, then this is true.

But I've seen startup phase companies with multiple slightly overlapping SaaS subscriptions (Linear + Trello + Asana for example), just because one PM prefers one over the other.

Then people have bought full-ass SaaS costing 50-100€/month for a single task it does.

I'd describe the "Use AI to make bespoke software" as the solution you use to round out the sharp edges in software (and licensing).

The survey SaaS wants extra money to connect to service Y, but their API is free? Fire up Claude and write the connector ourselves. We don't want to build and support a full survey tool, but API glue is fine.

Or someone is doing manual work because vendor A wants their data in format X and vendor B only accepts format Y. Out comes Claude and we create a tool that provides both outputs at the same time. (This was actually written by a copywriter on their spare time, just because they got annoyed with extra busywork. Now it's used by a half-dozen people)