SaaS is not dead

Nearly every day I hear people screaming that the sky is falling for B2B SaaS, yet I don't see it. They say SaaS will be replaced with internal tools written — in a weekend! — by the new onslaught of AI agents, but the people saying this usually aren't even running real businesses. They have no experience in the real world, yet they talk like they do.

Once you do start running a real business and once you do gain some experience, you recognize that it's never been about the code, much less how fast you can write it. Just because you can write more code faster doesn't change the buyer formula.

Buyers are looking for many things, but they are almost always in agreement with this: their team has a core competency, and your product is not one of them.

And I don't mean that they don't understand how to use your product. What I mean is they don't understand how to build your product, or why things are designed a certain way, much less how to evolve and maintain it. It's not their core competency.

Buyers want to offload that mental load — that auxiliary competency — to somebody else. The way to do that in 2026 is through SaaS.

This hasn't changed, and I don't see this changing.

No real business wants to maintain 100 sloppily-built internal tools, just like none want to self-host 100 open source tools.

Rather, they want their team to focus on their core competencies and have happy customers. And they want to do that without breaking the bank. Again, I don't see this changing.

If you start wrangling in all your SaaS and rebuilding it all in-house, you'll discover 2 things: you have the upfront cost to build (1), and you have the ongoing cost of maintenance (2). It's the classic question of "build vs buy." Nothing's changed. People might scream that things have changed, but they really haven't. Just because it's easier to build (1) doesn't mean it's cheaper to maintain (2).

Take either of these things alone and I can almost guarantee the cost is higher than the SaaS that's being replaced. Put them together and you have yourself a waste of time and money.

But sadly, the people being so hyperbolic on socials about the demise of SaaS don't run real businesses, so they have little to no experience and they don't understand the cost of time.

They'll glady spend 2 weeks building a replacement for some SaaS and brag to everybody about how they saved $50/mo. They're in a whole different world, and that's okay, but they shouldn't make blanket statements as if it applies to everybody.

At the end of the day it just comes across as engagement farming. Because it probably is. They have to hype up their 30k followers somehow, and AI dooming is the best way to do that right now.

Of course, some of these doomers do have real businesses. But if you look close enough, there's a very high likelihood that said business is an AI business, or is selling some sort of AI offering, and so they're not farming for engagement, but rather sowing fear for profit.

I feel like there was a shift at some point in the last couple years where all of the grifters of social media moved on from dooming about how crypto will upend the monetary system to dooming about how AI and LLMs will upend SaaS as we know it.

All this dooming often originates from the "indie hacker" crowd (or more accurately, the crowd that wants to have a real business, but doesn't have one yet), and if you zoom out a bit, this crowd has always valued their own time at near-zero. So it makes sense that they would be the crowd prophesying the death of B2B SaaS.

Though I think they'll soon be shown to be false prophets. Because I've seen my peer's velocity increasing almost across the board. I've seen small teams ship more, and grow more, and enjoy work more — and most of all, have time to enjoy their life more.

As a personal antidote, interest in Keygen has never been higher. I've never talked with more businesses about "build vs buy" than I have over this last year. Nearly every week, I get an email from a business that wants to migrate away from "build" to "buy" so that their team can focus on their core competencies again.

We closed out 2025 with a revenue growth rate of over 40%, and with a churn rate of only 1.9%. So much for a SaaS mass-exodus.

At the end of the day, the only customers that have left to "build" are indies, and I expect a lot of them to come back after they gain more experience — once they begin to value their own time.

Let's stop dooming. Let's stop being so hyperbolic.

Enjoy the new era.