SaaSpocalypse

Every enterprise deal we’ve closed at beehiiv required one thing, and it wasn’t having the best product. It was proving that we were secure.

Here's what happens if you’re not prepared: a prospect asks for your SOC 2. The deal stalls while you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the roadmap to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into a fire drill.

That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA—but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls.

And now, the Vanta agent runs where your team already works, in Claude or Cursor.

Vanta is trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Writer. You want this in place before the deal, not during it (trust me).

You may have heard of the SaaSpocalypse.

The thesis: with the rise of AI agents and coding tools, people and businesses are all going to build their own bespoke software, leaving these incumbent software businesses behind with an ever-diminishing customer base. That, and the rise of agentic workflows that will destroy the per-seat model that has grown so popular these past few decades. 

Every thinkboi on X shares this vision, claiming that software as we know it is dead. And in the past year, the SaaSpocalypse has gone from fringe to consensus. 

The markets have taken note. Shares in public SaaS companies have gotten crushed, despite many of those businesses performing arguably better than ever. 

Let’s look at HubSpot, for example. Over eight quarters HubSpot compounded revenue at ~20%, expanded margins nearly every quarter, went GAAP-profitable, and grew free cash flow more than 50% — hitting its 2027 margin target a year ahead of schedule.

But the stock is down ~55% from its 52-week high (bottomed out at 68%). 

The market hates uncertainty. Sure, performance has been good (arguably excellent), but the acceleration of AI is so “unprecedented” that it’s impossible to bet on the status quo (i.e. HubSpot remaining relevant in an AI-first world).

Betting on the SaaSpocalypse means betting on the thesis that all of these companies will soon be moot in a world where AI deploys custom software for everyone. That every SMB on earth is just one Claude Code session away from firing their entire stack, and that nobody will ever have to maintain any of it. 

I’m not betting against Anthropic (or AI), but I am here to tell you that the SaaSpocalypse is totally overblown and complete bullshit.

Most of those claiming that SaaS is dead have never actually built anything at all. They aren’t in the arena using the latest tools. They’ve never built or run a business at scale. They probably think that Opus is some sort of peptide. 

Let me tell you why they’re all wrong. Actually, let me take it from the very top.

Here are a few examples of SaaS companies: Shopify, Adobe, Zoom, Canva, Salesforce, beehiiv, etc. Software as a service (SaaS) is exactly what it sounds like — you pay someone to provide a service you don't have to build yourself.

When you host your storefront on Shopify, you don’t need to build your own payment infrastructure, or host your own website, or think about sales tax across all 50 states, VAT in the EU, PCI compliance, chargeback disputes, or fraud. 

In fact, they have a team of nearly 8,000 people who specialize in e-commerce, payments, checkout, fraud, logistics, and everything else to ensure your storefront is best positioned for success. They even routinely push updates to make the Shopify software better while you sleep. 

You get best-in-class infrastructure for your online storefront, and no one on your team even thinks about it at all. From that perspective, the $39 per month you’re paying Shopify feels like a steal. That’s the beauty of SaaS. 

We can use beehiiv as an example too. Technically, anyone has been able to build their own email infrastructure for decades. The same way anyone could build their own storefront for e-commerce. AI just makes it easier, and puts it within reach of people who aren't technical.

With the help of AI, sure, you could spend thousands of dollars and several months building your own email platform and have your own (much worse) version of beehiiv, custom-built just for you. 

But when your team needs to integrate the newsletter with your podcast, or send dynamic content to your readers, or have access to enriched audience data… you’ll need to go back to the well and have someone on your team build these features themselves. 

When you want to monetize your newsletter, whether with ads or subscriptions, you’ll need to build your own sales pipeline, reporting, user authentication, payment rails, renewal logic, customer alerts, and more. 

When your emails start to land in spam, your team is now solely responsible for figuring out email deliverability all on their own. 

And remember — replacing SaaS and building the software yourself isn’t free. You still need to pay for the infrastructure, servers, maintenance, monitoring, and the other software and plugins required to make it all work. Not to mention the added human capital required to build and manage everything (indefinitely). 

So after all of the time, money, and labor required to build a worse version of beehiiv, you’re now stuck having to maintain and update it all on your own forever. Or, hear me out, you could pay a small premium to have 130 specialists own all of that for you. That premium comes with regular software updates, access to the latest tools, uptime guarantees, and a team of experts in email deliverability and creator tools who can help you whenever you need it.

That’s the crux of the SaaSpocalypse debate. And there’s a small vocal minority of indie hackers who run solo teams claiming that everyone is going to build their own software just because it’s now technically possible. 

If that were true, you would expect me (the CEO of a tech company, with 50+ engineers and a huge bias towards building vs buying) to have totally replaced all of our SaaS spend. But we still happily pay for Slack, Sentry, Linear, HubSpot, Loom, Zendesk, Amplitude, Ramp, Notion, Customer.io, etc. In fact, we pay considerably more for these today than we did just a year ago. 

As my COO, Dan, says: we’ve been able to bake bread forever. Most people still buy it.

Meanwhile, I’m not just yapping from the peanut gallery talking hypotheticals either. I’m in the arena. I’ve done the work myself. 

Last week, I announced that a few friends and I launched a social wellness club in Medellín. It’s called MADRE, and it’s home to the largest sauna in all of Latin America. (By the way, if you live there you should book a session. And if you don’t live in Medellín, you should follow us on Instagram). 

We could have used Mindbody, WellnessLiving, Walla, or any of the other platforms to manage bookings and memberships. It would have cost less than $100 a month and been ready to use in a few hours. SaaS baby.

But out of curiosity, watching this whole vibe coding movement from the sidelines on X… I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to get my hands dirty and build it myself.

As for my credentials: I'm a self-taught developer. I led product and engineering at Morning Brew, was a Product Lead at YouTube, and currently run product at beehiiv. I've built a lot of software, and I think I have a decent eye for design.

Here’s the MADRE landing page to vouch for that design eye 😉

Keep all of that in mind as I explain what happened next…

I spent about 6 full weekends, I’d estimate maybe 80+ hours, building this website and platform from scratch. I probably spent another 20+ hours doing QA to ensure everything works perfectly. 

I had to build custom integrations with Twilio, Resend, Customer.io, Vercel, Slack, Sentry, Supabase, and Wompi (a local payment provider in Colombia). Yes, pay for and configure each of those individual accounts as well. I built an admin portal so our managers can run the business. I had to purchase datáfonos (payment terminals) to build and test the physical payment infrastructure. 

I also had to create user guides and tutorials to hand off to the team so they could learn and operate the software on their own. 

And that’s just the upfront investment. When the staff provided feedback, I had to build new features to support their requests. I also have Sentry errors piping into Slack to alert the team whenever there’s an issue with the platform.

As for who has to update and fix the software when it’s broken? That’s on me. But I have a full-time job running beehiiv and don’t have the bandwidth to do that outside a couple of hours here and there on the weekends (uh oh). 

Add up Twilio, Vercel, Customer.io, Sentry, Resend, and Supabase and we're paying multiples more than what a SaaS company would charge to handle all of it for us. And that SaaS company would be improving the product, watching it for problems, and answering the phone when something breaks.

For the low, low price of $300 per month, and hours of my life I'll never get back… we have a fully custom-built solution that we can edit and tweak however we'd like :).

Remember my credentials? I've led product and engineering at multiple startups and it still took me a hundred hours. Hell, I’m still technically on-call to support it. 

Do you think the average person selling cowboy boots in Jackson Hole is going to cancel their $39 per month Shopify subscription to spend 100+ hours building their own store, and then hire someone to manage it forever?

Of course not. And the millions of small businesses paying for Salesforce aren’t going to build their own CRMs either.

I rest my case.

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