Easy SaaS is dying
Mike Codeur
Marc Lou was on Sans Permission. Great episode: the struggles, the launches, ShipFast, building in public, the revenue, the hard calls.
But one topic was barely touched, and it is the most important one. The model he popularised for years is taking a hit.
The model in question
You know it. You have probably read about it a hundred times on X.
Fast SaaS. Single-feature. Shipped in a few days. A clean landing page, Stripe, one API integration, a $19/month subscription. Repeat across ten ideas, two work, you live off them.
For a long time, that could work. Genuinely. It was not a scam, it was an accurate read of a market that existed.
The problem is that every pillar of that model is giving way.
Why it breaks
Ask yourself honestly: why would anyone pay a subscription for a small feature when...
- ChatGPT does it directly. A large share of single-feature SaaS were wrappers in disguise. Rewrite a text, generate a summary, convert a format. That became a conversation.
- An agent automates the whole workflow. Your product solved one step. An agent chains all ten steps, yours included, without ever stopping at your product.
- A competitor clones you in 48 hours. Your unique feature is two days of AI-assisted work. The technical barrier that protected you is gone. It already protected you poorly; now it does not protect you at all.
- Distribution costs more than the product. This is the hardest part. Building became nearly free, so everyone builds, so attention is saturated. What you used to spend on development, you now spend on acquisition. Except acquisition did not get cheaper.
The summary: what was scarce became abundant, and what was the real bottleneck stayed scarce.
SaaS is not dead. Easy SaaS is dead.
That distinction matters, and it gets flattened in most discussions.
There is a difference between "nobody will pay for software anymore" (false, absurd) and "the version where you ship a feature in three days and wait for the recurring $19 no longer works" (becoming true).
What survives
The SaaS that will hold have at least one of these attributes. The best ones have several.
| Attribute | Why it protects you |
|---|---|
| Real distribution | An audience, a channel, a brand. That does not get cloned in 48 hours. It has become the primary asset, not the code. |
| Proprietary data | What the model does not know and cannot guess. Your data compounds, your product improves, the gap widens. |
| A deep business workflow | Not one step: the whole process, with its exceptions, its awkward cases, its twenty years of habits. Slow to understand and painful to replicate. |
| Strong enterprise integration | Once installed, connected and adopted by teams, the exit cost is enormous. It does not get replaced because a competitor is 20% cheaper. |
| A painful problem AI alone cannot solve | Compliance, liability, contracts, human coordination. AI helps, but someone has to answer for the output. |
Look at the list: none of these is built in a weekend. That is exactly the point.
What it means if you are a dev
There are two readings, and I lean heavily toward the second.
The first: this is depressing, the window closed, I am too late.
The second: the easy part disappeared, so serious competition shrank. When building was expensive, your edge was knowing how to build. Now that everyone can build, your edge is knowing what to build, for whom, and how to get it to them.
That is not a dev skill. It is a product and distribution skill. And it is precisely what most devs avoided for ten years.
The right moment to understand that is now. Not in two years, when the people who understood it already have the lead.
Conclusion
The disposable-SaaS model worked because a scarce skill protected it. That skill is no longer scarce.
What is still scarce: understanding a business deeply, owning an audience, accumulating data nobody else has. That was always harder than writing code. It is now the only thing that counts.
I break it all down in the video: the SaaS that will keep working, the ones AI will crush, and what you should do now. Easy SaaS is dying
And if you want this kind of analysis every week, it is in The Agentic Dev.