An insightful comment on HackerNews:

"The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower.

The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics.^[e]

AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production.

What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

SaaS isn't going to sublimate straight into consumer built tools but the boiling point for competition has gotten a lot lower."

Pricing power comes down to customers' BATNA.

Sure, customers likely won't build it themselves (especially if there's regulatory or compliance features), but someone else can easily.

The "value-based pricing" for spreadsheets-in-a-trenchcoat Saas software in an era of agentic coding is a fantasy.