Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.
Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.
And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.
Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?
I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?
Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors
We've been in the SaaS game for a few years now—building, shipping, and growing small products—and I just can't help but feel that the landscape is changing in a troubling way.
Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.
Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.
And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.
Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?
I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?
Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors
As growth slows or opportunities present, they’ll dip deeper down the stack to make money or shore up their other businesses.
SaaS providers need to really get to know their core audience, and expand their product offerings so that their customers don't need to subscribe to multiple tools. It's a product challenge. When you can build more software quickly and easily, you have to really understand your customer needs
imo, the quality of the product doesn't need to be so perfect, only the necessary what users are expecting is enough, but if you had a perfect marketing strategy you can sell anything, and I learned that from "stanley water bottle", they managed to wash people's minds to buy a f*cking water bottle for 70$, or I guess it was even more than that when it was trendy
Perhaps in your corner of the industry. On the consumer side people have been very vocally tired of purchasing products piecemeal on a subscription basis for a long time now. I, personally, am so sick of everything being a subscription I refuse to participate except in one or two services I use almost every single day. SaaS vendors to me are without a doubt vultures. A good exception that makes me happy is jetbrains. They are one of the few I am happy to pay for. Most of the other consumer grade SaaS is churn and burn crap.
I personally welcome the death of SaaS. I hope it brings forth a new era where I actually own things and can pay a company every couple years some nominal percentage of retail for a “service pack” upgrade.
But, to answer the question: no, SaaS is not going anywhere. If you're facing problems, it's not AI, it's your product.