I strongly believe the build/buy equation is much different in 2026 than it was in 2024
Man, they must have gotten paid crazy overtime. Kudos!
lol first time?
I only built the 20% they actually needed, with faster UI and better UX.
If you freelance, this is where you can make money with AI.
This idea that software developer productivity being the goal for AI companies is just not it - every piece of code you put into an LLM is a you giving these giant companies your expertise
People need to remember where the bulk of engineering money goes: consumer advertising and consumer facing applications, and don’t forget most of them have tragically bad user experiences and dark patterns because they’re trying to make the software as a service model work for investors
if I can spend a week replicating your software that has all these bullshit dark pattern features and I can replicate that for my own why why wouldn’t I?
i guess the problem is that once a teamp goes through the process of figuring out good UX for a certain flow, which can take time, that UX then becomes trivial to copy.
Does anyone know of examples of where a private equity buyout has made things better for the consumer?
For software like Zendesk that was already thoroughly professionalized, I agree, it's hard to think of positive attributes to a PE buyout!
I built https://pointanswer.com/ for myself to host 3 of my own SaaS instead of paying more than $100/mo for simple helpcenter. I'm the only one using it with no customers but it's still way better than paying for Zendesk.
But did spent too much time on it as I built in pre-Claude era.
My personal experience: For many years I used Zendesk to manage support and host my documentation. It's a powerful platform with help center structure that I liked liked the most. I was paying about US$30/mo for OnVoard.
When I use Zendesk for my second SaaS business, RenderKu, it costs me $70/mo. This amount is more than 3 Hetzner servers I'm paying to host the whole infrastructure. And I'm only choosing Zendesk mainly for hosting documentation.
At this point, when I was planning to start my 3rd app business, the thought of forking another $70/mo for hosting documentation made me rethink my options. I've eventually come to the conclusion it would be better for me to start PointAnswer and use it as helpcenter for myself since I only needed simple and affordable helpcenter.
I certainly don't think Zendesk's core business is threatened here, and I have no desire to replace Zendesk with a custom solution. But Zendesk's ability to upcharge, sell adjacent products, and pass on cost increases is hugely threatened. If PE was planning on a decade of consistent cost increases and more land, that dream seems materially threatened!
Cool story but I would not want to be in their shoes. Treating your employees poorly only to justify overnight changes in business needs creates a highly toxic work environment.
If I worked there I'd be immediately looking for a new employer, I guarantee this isn't the first time they've done stuff like this over the years.
One started out as an acquisition of a group on sales force, we wrote migrated to our brand new crm the first month and integrated our PBX and several other functions within the first 3 months.
It's not hard, most CRMs don't need "webscale", you can whip up a highly targeted and integrated CRM in rails in the blink of any eye.
That's why I'm pretty sure in 2001/02 I had the earliest real customer, real time, audio reviews published online in the world.
Like any decision during a startup buy/build is a situation specific decision you have to make at every point and 3rd party CRMs are fine to launch with... but, I mean, come on.
The correct answer to this behavior needs to be "lol no" until these companies learn this behavior is unacceptable at any price. They could've boiled the frog at a 10% annual hike and nobody would've cared, but you double and you are fired as a vendor and that's that.
Actually LLMs are like the ultimate laziness enabler. But as people adjust their expectations this stuff will no longer look impressive, since people will know it's just AI slop, and the lazies will fade back into obscurity.
Why not make an open source alternative to the product?
Because everyone's needs are just a little different, and collaborating takes maintenance. Forks are free, merges are expensive.
I guess that is a valid solution to that prompt.
Large companies may have difficulty embracing this strategy because software is a cost center, and not a revenue center, for them. The returns to efficiency gains are really hard to measure.
And if someone has gone to the bother to make a prompt that helps my LLM build one, and it either already doesn't have the features I don't need, or I can have my LLM start by trimming the features I don't need before it builds it...
Then I think you're saying the same thing I'm saying.
The final straw was attempting to move Zendesk down to one seat to have historical/archive capabilities for a period of time, and they couldn't even manage that process properly.
He’s not a software developer, he has no concept of software maintenance or security.
I’ve been watching and it’s interesting to me because I would not be surprised that he’s not alone as a small family business. Many probably feel liberated from company’s that would enforce a certain cookie cutter shape.
Does this mean AI is shifting towards contractor jobs more? Does it mean a huge security issue brewing? Both? Maybe business owners turned SWVibers like him will swing back to an off the shelf option once pouring more effort into 3am-my-stuff-is-broke scenarios becomes more of a chore than it’s worth.
I feel like there are a million billion green field projects brewing that will soon turn brown for one reason or another.
I mean, that's what, as an industry, we're all desperately hoping for, but, well, shit. ChatGPT-5.5 is quite capable, so if the business owner is disciplined and prompts it with thought, I'm not so sure those greenfield projects are going to turn brown. Hell, if I was an AC business owner, would I rather pay a software startup who think they know the AC business, or pay another AC business owner to use the software they wrote?
"Your job isn't going to be taken by AI, it's going to be taken by someone using AI" -Jenson Huang
Problem is, that person using AI is from outside our field. (Not a problem for the AC business owner who has a new product to sell! Good on them, if they choose to go that route.)
I'm all for sticking it to zendesk, but as I tell every single person who were thinking to roll their own solution, have you thought about Integration? That's zendesk's moat. They have an integration with almost every single platform you can think of. It works with all e-commerce, but also ebay and amazon. It can communicate via WhatsApp, imessage, signal, and everything in between. Then connects to salesforce and netsuite.
I know this is a AI generated post, talking about an AI generated app. So next I'm expecting the AI agent deleted our prod database posts.
It's in production for 4 months now.
I've not felt need for anything. We 2-3 custom integration built into it.
The only issue I had was spam. So I thought about adding turnstile but guess what? Cloudflare turnstile was giving me some error so I just added honey pot fields and didn't have any issue so far.
And also sqlite+go is blazingly fast, our agent love the speed.
It's running on $5-6 Hetzner server. Backups using Litestream to s3.
Still: when you code your own solution, you don't need to build an integration with every single platform you can think of. Just those you use.
And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.
As is most things in engineering, this is a trade-off and the line where buy vs build exists somewhere to be found and justified. Sure AI moves the line closer to build these days.
As someone who's had to maintain a Zendesk integration such as this for a large app it's hard to understate the benefit of having all that support info so close to the rest of your user's data. I have seen a huge amount of effort go into trying to get just the right balance of data in and out of ZD. Also helps alleviate concerns with sharing too much customer data with a third party.
This definitely isn't the right call for everyone, but there's a lot of upside if it can work for your organization.
On a different note, what Zendesk did is pretty much regular play now, hopefully some serious competition will keep that in check.
Have fun Chesterton's fencing yourself into much of what other companies spent years learning and solving.
Prototypes and proofs of concept were easy even before AI.
petcat•49m ago
Just get an AI bot to make one for you
notatoad•41m ago
the value platforms provide is that _you_ didn't make the software, somebody else did, so somebody else defines the functionality and workflow of the software. it can be treated as fixed, and a thing that people learn how to use. they have support docs and training resources for your staff to access. when somebody has a problem, you can tell them to make a ticket with freshdesk not with you.
if you make the software in-house, you have to also make all those training resources yourself. you have to make all the ui decisions. and you have to defend those ui decisions, even when each of your support staff wants something different, and knows there's nothing preventing you from changing it to exactly what they want. even when exactly what they want contradicts with what the person sitting next to them wants.
andai•34m ago
Also nice try Zendesk ;)
fontain•41m ago
stnikolauswagne•41m ago
There is just so much clunk and developer hostile stuff going on that I would rather just not deal with it anymore.
ahknight•35m ago