The Death of One-Size-Fits-All SAAS

I've been watching something interesting happen in the SaaS world, and I think we're about to see a massive shift that most people aren't talking about yet. The whole "one-size-fits-all" model that's dominated software for the past two decades is about to become as outdated as dial-up internet. We're moving from generic software to made-to-measure solutions, and it's happening faster than anyone expected.

The old economics and the new reality

For years, we've been forcing millions of businesses into the same rigid software boxes. Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack - they all work the same way for a Fortune 500 company as they do for a 10-person startup. Sure, they have "customization options," but those are just different ways to arrange the same furniture in the same room.

Why did we accept this? Because the economics were brutal. Building custom software required armies of developers, months of development time, and budgets that only enterprise clients could afford. So SaaS companies built generic solutions and hoped they'd work for 80% of their users. The other 20%? They just had to deal with it or find workarounds.

This created a fundamental problem with how software companies handled user needs. You'd submit feedback, it would go into some black hole called "the roadmap," and maybe - if you were lucky and thousands of other users wanted the same thing - you'd see it implemented two years later. That sluggish feedback incorporation wasn't because companies didn't care. It was because every feature had to work for everyone. Adding a new workflow meant considering how it would affect millions of users across different industries, use cases, and technical setups. The complexity was paralyzing.

These new AI coding tools - what we call now "vibe coding" - are showing great potential and with the right structure in place they are extremely valuable. We've seen this in our own work with existing customers, though I would like to think that the difference between us and others is how we deploy these tools, which is more strategic and with the right structure in place we have proven that they work. We can now deliver software at scale. The economics are beginning to shift in ways that weren't possible before.

When you can generate custom software on demand, that whole feedback problem disappears. Your needs don't have to go through a committee and get watered down to work for everyone. They just get implemented. For you. Right now.

The economic flip and what comes next

The cost structure is beginning to invert. It used to be cheaper to buy generic software and deal with the limitations. In the not so distant future, it will often be cheaper to build exactly what you need.

Generic SaaS companies have massive overhead - they need to support millions of users, handle edge cases for dozens of industries, maintain backward compatibility, and build features that work for everyone. That's expensive, and those costs get passed on to customers. Custom software built with AI agents? The only overhead is the compute cost and the time it takes to describe what you want. No sales team, no customer success managers, no feature bloat you'll never use.

I think we're about to see SaaS companies split into two categories: the infrastructure providers (databases, hosting, integration layer, APIs) and the experience providers (custom interfaces built on top of that infrastructure). The companies that try to stay in the middle are going to get squeezed from both sides. Why pay for their generic interface when you can build exactly what you need on top of better infrastructure?

This doesn't mean all SaaS is dead. But the era of forcing your business to adapt to someone else's idea of how software should work? That's ending. The future is made-to-measure software, built on demand, designed for your exact needs. And honestly, it's about time.