AI is coming for SaaS, and nobody is talking about it

Everyone is busy arguing about which jobs AI will kill. Designers, copywriters, junior developers. The usual panic cycle. But there is a bigger shift happening that gets almost no airtime: AI is about to gut the SaaS industry.

The stock market seems to have noticed before the pundits did. Valuations of SaaS companies have been sliding for months. Some of that is macro, sure, but some of it is investors doing the maths on what happens when businesses stop paying for platforms they barely use.

And that is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: most companies use 10% to 30% of any given SaaS product. Maybe less. You are paying for Shopify but you use a fraction of what it can do. You are on Webflow but your site could be a static page with a form. The gap between what you need and what you are paying for has always existed. It just used to be too expensive to close it.

That is what changed.

Before AI-assisted development, building even a small slice of what Webflow or Shopify does was a serious investment. Tens of thousands of dollars. Months of work. You would look at the cost, look at the monthly subscription, and the subscription won. Every time.

Now the calculus is different. If you only need 15% of a platform, and an AI-assisted developer can build that 15% in a week, the subscription starts looking like a bad deal. Not because the platform is bad. Because you are paying for someone else's vision of what your business needs, when you could have something built around how your business actually works.

We tested this at Right Tech over the last few months. We replaced a handful of internal services we were paying for with purpose-built tools. Small apps. Custom dashboards. Automation that fits our workflow instead of forcing us into someone else's. The result: thousands of dollars in monthly savings, and tools that do exactly what we need without the bloat we were ignoring anyway.

I want to be honest about the limits here. This is not a "anyone can replace Shopify with a weekend project" situation. Building a real replacement for even a fraction of a complex platform requires actual engineering skill. AI makes a good developer faster. It does not make a non-developer into a good developer. That gap will exist for a long time, and anyone selling you the idea that it won't is either confused or trying to sell you something.

But the direction is clear. More businesses are going to look at their SaaS stack and ask: do we actually need all this? Could we have something smaller, cheaper, and built around our actual workflow? And for a growing number of them, the answer will be yes.

The SaaS model worked because custom software was too expensive for most companies. AI is lowering that cost fast enough that the model stops working for a lot of use cases. Not all of them. Nobody is building their own Stripe any time soon. But the mid-tier, the platforms where you are paying $200 or $500 a month for features you never touch? That is where the bleeding starts.

I think the industry is going to split. The platforms that survive will be the ones solving genuinely hard problems that are not worth rebuilding. The rest will face a slow migration toward in-house solutions that are shaped around the business instead of the other way round.

That is not speculation. It is already happening. Most people just have not noticed yet.