What if users start cloning SaaS using AI
Comments
sdevonoes
brudgers
Customer service is a moat that can justifies premium pricing.
Premium pricing segments the market for customers who see value in what you do.
And premium pricing allows you to afford customer service.
codingdave
You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project.
That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision.
If anything, the ease of launching an MVP should prove what many folks already know - coding is not the bottleneck that prevents business success. It is the tool that allows you to step up to the starting line.
mzubairtahir
It's not about cloning and selling your own app. It's about using app that you are paying for, by cloning it using AI.
sph
An app that you now have to maintain. The point of spending $5 a month is not to have to deal with that hassle. It makes zero sense to do it to save money. SaaS customers really aren’t in the business of SaaS cloning.
The only people that might look into cloning an existing business are competitors, and by virtue of being competitors they already were a danger to the business.
leros
Companies are happy to pay for SaaS products that are being run by a team of people who are experts in that domain and are also responsible for anything that goes wrong. Cloning something in house, no matter how it's done, doesn't bring you the subject matter experts and it shifts the responsibility/blame internally.
soulchild37
Those aren't serious users anyway, business users who are focusing on their business don't have the time to clone and maintain their own software. People who claim to successfully clone and replace SaaS are never good customers anyway, they will either churn after free trial has ended, or post on reddit searching for free alternative
mzubairtahir
That's true that businesses don't want to waste their time by maintaining that software but it's also true that a bigger number of users will start cloning in the future especially fable, it's very good at this thing.
drop-a-deuce
Have to train on top of the models or have some sauce not publically available.
Hard part has never been building software anyway ita getting clients and building trust with them.
mzubairtahir
You did not get my point. My point was about if user just start cloning apps they are already using.
Jeremy1026
Start? We're well past that. If your SaaS is just a fancy wrapper on some CRUD it's already been cloned by AI a dozen times. Even if it has some level of sophistication, unless there is a trove of data that only you have access to, it's already been cloned.
haute_cuisine
This doesn’t work now unfortunately as described. Cloning is multi-months effort and it’s hard even when you know what you’re doing. If you want to have a sellable clone, it’s even harder challenge as users wouldn’t tolerate sloppy work when better alternatives exist.
i_have_an_idea
You just discovered the SaaSpocalypse that began around January this year.
sph
Is there an actual SaaSpocalypse, or just people saying it is going to happen? Because I haven’t seen it with my eyes, and it’s not like business owners are flooding to HN to complain how AI has killed their business.
fragmede
What's going away is really shitty business models out of spite. I'd rather not build it myself, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it, but if the vendor is being a bunch of shitheads, I'll roll up my sleeves and replace them.
OsrsNeedsf2P
This is why investors ask what your moat is
Even if cloning a saas is one click away (it isn’t now, but let’s imagine), you would still need to run it in production. If you care a bit about it, you probably want to keep it secure and up to date, and keep backups, and add monitoring/alerting. While AI can help with all of this, is still some work to be done by a (knowledgeable) human.
I doubt a large percentage of any user base is willing to do all of that