Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.
Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.
And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.
Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?
I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?
Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors
We've been in the SaaS game for a few years now—building, shipping, and growing small products—and I just can't help but feel that the landscape is changing in a troubling way.
Prices are going up across the board. Tools that were once affordable for indie founders or early-stage teams are suddenly priced for enterprise budgets. The "freemium" model is giving way to aggressive trials, usage-based pricing, and paywalls around core features. It's as if the barrier to entry is increasing not only for customers, but also for builders.
Meanwhile, competition is fiercer than ever. AI is speeding up development, but it's also flooding markets overnight. Hundreds of clones, minor modifications, and "launch-first-iterate-later" products overwhelm the same niches. Discovery has been broken. Differentiation is more difficult than it's ever been.
And perhaps worst of all, trust is being lost. Users are tired of bait-and-switch, surprise deprecations, and data lock-ins. There's a feeling that too many SaaS businesses are more concerned with growth-at-all-costs than product quality, user experience, and long-term value.
Are we hurtling towards a SaaS winter? Or is this merely a bad patch in a changing ecosystem?
I'd love to know how you're feeling—particularly other indie founders and bootstrapped teams. Are you hopeful, or are you questioning your role in SaaS entirely?
Would you like to customize it for a particular audience—such as startup founders, developers, or investors
zer8k•9mo ago
Perhaps in your corner of the industry. On the consumer side people have been very vocally tired of purchasing products piecemeal on a subscription basis for a long time now. I, personally, am so sick of everything being a subscription I refuse to participate except in one or two services I use almost every single day. SaaS vendors to me are without a doubt vultures. A good exception that makes me happy is jetbrains. They are one of the few I am happy to pay for. Most of the other consumer grade SaaS is churn and burn crap.
I personally welcome the death of SaaS. I hope it brings forth a new era where I actually own things and can pay a company every couple years some nominal percentage of retail for a “service pack” upgrade.