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
To me AI might have tilted the economic on doing in house a bit but it has been at least a decade or more that I find most enterprise SaaS, in the way they are used 80% of the time, could be recreated with a few developers in house. Instead of 10-20 developers maybe you only need 2-5 with AI, so for most big companies that doesn’t change much. A company that wants to build in house still has to hire a team. And in most non tech industries even if more expensive usually a service is preferred. SaaS was never (only) about costs, developers were already wondering why people would pay for an expensive CRM 10 years ago when it was only basic CRUD.