You marry the software you write.

We will value each other again... someday.

But right now, web development - especially SaaS builders - are undergoing a midlife crisis right now.

As AI made coding trivial, and enabled people who never coded before to spin up apps, there is a clear mindset emerging: “I’ll just built it myself”.

Why should I pay $5 bucks per month so you can log my app bugs, I’ll just build it myself!

Why integrate your analytics library? I’ll just vibe code my own.

I see a lot of people saying saas is dead now that everyone can literally build anything themselves. And while the second part of that sentence is true, there is something that keep saas from completely dying out.

Software is never finished. Everything you write is something you now own and are responsible for.

Your bug tracking app - well, better work and not have bugs in it. So now instead of building your app, you are now maintaining a bug tracking app.

Instead of paying $5 bucks per month, you spent hours vibe coding an alternative, that nobody else will use and now you must maintain.

Maybe when you’re done building the 10th tool you build to save money, you realize you’re just waisting a ton of time instead.

And then maybe the $5 bucks per month to not deal with a problem anymore might be worth it.

What we are really buying isn’t software. It’s expertise, reliability, ownership and trust. You are buying the effort people put into projects you are treating as a side quest.

We’re currently going thru the romantic stages of our relationship with AI, eventually we’ll read the maintenance stage of our relationship where it stops being fun and start being work. Maybe then we’ll stop chasing every whim we can prompt and start valuing the work and effort others are putting into the projects they care about.

In other works, Maybe one day we’ll start valuing each other again.