So I'd reframe the thesis a bit: AI didn't destroy the moat, it moved it. Saving the customer setup time is no longer worth paying for, taking operational liability for the customer still is. SaaS that only offer the former are indeed in trouble, and honestly founders should verify that their product doesn't have this issue.
It's actually why I stopped at Railway level instead of going full VPS.
newaccountman2•1h ago
Really? That's too hard for the author without an LLM agent?
jvidalv•57m ago
I wouldn't switch from Vercel just to save X% per month, because the real cost was all the extra time to build and maintain the infrastructure myself. The savings never justified the hours.
With agents that math changes. The build and maintenance work moves onto the agent, so the savings threshold where switching makes sense drops a lot.
On top of that there are other goodies. Vercel is serverless, so you can't co-locate the API with the DB, which means extra latency and yet another bill (Supabase?). That's one more thing you can now own for basically no effort.