I'll be honest with you.
The last time I considered paying for a SaaS product, I caught myself thinking: "Wait. Could I just build this myself?"
And the answer, increasingly, is yes.
That moment changed something in how I see the software industry.
AI democratized building. Nobody fully processed what that means yet.
A few years ago, building a working web app required real technical depth. Months of learning. A team. Infrastructure knowledge. It was a high barrier and SaaS products existed precisely because most people couldn't build their own tools.
That barrier is collapsing.
With AI, a developer even a junior one can now conceive, design, and ship a functional application in days. Not months. A solo student in their bedroom can build what used to require a funded startup.
And here's the logical consequence nobody talks about enough: if anyone can build software, why would they pay someone else for it?
I already think this way. And I don't think I'm alone.
Before subscribing to any tool now, I ask myself three questions:
- Do I actually need all the features this SaaS offers, or just 20% of them?
- Could I build a lightweight version that does exactly what I need?
- Would maintaining it be worth the subscription cost?
More and more often, the answer points toward building my own version.
Not because I'm cheap. But because AI makes it genuinely faster and easier to build a custom solution than to adapt my workflow to someone else's product.
A personal project management tool. A custom dashboard. A note taking app with exactly the features I want. A budget tracker built around my actual habits.
Why pay $12/month for a tool that does 80% of what I need when I can build 100% of what I need in a weekend?
The SaaS products that will suffer
Not all SaaS will die. But I think a specific category is in serious trouble: the simple, single-purpose tools.
The ones that do one thing. Solve one problem. The ones where the value proposition is essentially: "We built this so you don't have to."
That value proposition just got a lot weaker.
If your product's entire moat is "we wrote the code and you didn't have to" AI just erased your moat.
Think about:
- Simple form builders
- Basic invoice generators
- Lightweight project trackers
- Note-taking apps with no unique angle
- Simple landing page builders
Every single one of these is now buildable by a motivated developer with AI assistance in a weekend.
The SaaS products that will survive
The ones that survive will have something AI-assisted solo development can't easily replicate:
Network effects value that comes from other users being on the platform
Data moats insights and intelligence that come from aggregating millions of users' data
Deep integrations years of ecosystem connections that would take months to rebuild
Compliance and trust regulated industries where "I built it myself" isn't good enough
Scale infrastructure the kind of backend complexity that goes far beyond a weekend project
Notion, Stripe, Figma, Linear, these aren't threatened by someone building their own version. They offer something fundamentally hard to replicate alone.
The $9/month form builder with no unique angle? That's a different story.
What this means for developers building SaaS today
If you're building a SaaS product right now, I think this is the most important question you need to answer honestly:
Could a motivated developer with AI assistance replicate your core value in a weekend?
If the answer is yes you have a problem. Not an immediate one. But a growing one.
The market for "we built this so you don't have to" is shrinking. The market for "we built something you genuinely couldn't build yourself" is still very much alive.
My honest take
I think we're entering a world where software splits into two categories:
Personal, custom tools built by individuals for themselves, free, perfectly tailored, AI-assisted
Platform-scale products with network effects, data, compliance, and infrastructure that individuals can't replicate
The middle ground the simple paid SaaS with no unique moat is going to get squeezed from both sides.
And honestly? I think that's good for users. We've been paying subscription fees for tools that were always a little too generic, a little too bloated, a little too expensive for what they actually delivered.
AI is giving us a way out.
What do you think are you starting to build your own tools instead of paying for SaaS? Or do you think paid products will always have an edge that self-built tools can't match?
This is part of a series where I share my honest thoughts on AI, learning, and building in tech.
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