SaaS is dead.
“SaaS is dead.” We keep hearing this more and more from AI enthusiasts.
And people are building apps over the weekend and calling it the end of the software market.
Lovable and Claude Code truly lowered the entry barrier. But does that mean we’ll stop buying SaaS?
Not quite.
Here’s a reality check.
Yes, the barrier to entry is gone. You can spin up a working application without any tech background.
That’s real and it’s happening. But let’s be honest about what you’re actually building.
When you buy e.x Hubspot, you’re not paying because you can’t build a CRM. You’re paying because someone else handles uptime, SLA, security compliance, and the integrations you haven’t even thought about yet.
“The app” is not the product itself.
Reliability, trust, and ecosystem are also quite important factor.
There’s another angle people miss. A CRM is not a contact database. It’s a model of how your team sells.
When you buy a SaaS license, you’re also buying a codified way of working.
Someone thought through the pipeline, the statuses, the reporting before you.
Building your own app means designing all of that domain logic from scratch too.
And when you buy a software license, you’re not just buying how the app works today.
You’re buying the roadmap.
The features shipping in six months.
The community.
The integrations with tools you’ll adopt next year.
A weekend app doesn’t have that. It starts good and slowly falls behind.
Now, the split is real. For a small team or a solo founder, the math changes. Something simple, specific, and cheap to build yourself?
Go for it. But in a corporate environment, no one is deploying a weekend app into production.
Procurement, security review, compliance.
That conversation doesn’t even start.
What will actually happen is a split in the market.
Large, mature platforms with ecosystems will keep growing. They have too much to lose too little.
What will suffer are weak micro SaaS products.
Single-function tools that solve one simple problem. Those are exactly the things you can now build yourself in a week.
SaaS isn’t dead. But the market is shifting and it’s worth knowing which side you’re on.