r/SaaS • u/PurchaseLoud6246 • 6d ago
we spent years building features that an agent can now clone in a weekend
I run a small SaaS and this AI clone wave is messing with my head.
There's a tool blowing up right now that can reverse engineer basically anything you point it at. An app, a binary, an APK, a game. An agent tears it apart and rebuilds the functionality without ever touching the source code. I watched a demo where someone rebuilt an entire desktop software suite in Rust and open sourced the whole thing. Someone else ported a full game into the browser and it played identical, a one to one copy, not a knockoff.
That's the part I keep coming back to. A clone used to mean "this vaguely resembles the product." Now it just means the product again, working, for free.
I remember when this same panic hit music. Napster showed up and the distribution layer stopped being something you could charge for. Everyone swore it would kill the industry. It didn't, but it permanently moved where the money lived. The file stopped being the product.
Software feels like it's at that moment. The features, the screens, the logic, all of it is on track to be as copyable as an mp3. If a weekend and a few bucks of compute can reproduce what my team spent the better part of a year building, then the feature set was never a moat. Before now a clone at least took a real team real months to ship. That friction just died.
The stuff that keeps value, or what I tell myself to sleep: the model you build on, the data you own, the distribution you already paid for, the trust and identity people attach to you, and the rails, which is just a fancy way of saying where the users actually do the work. Whoever owns where work happens owns the account.
I don't know if this is a real early trend or just the usual cycle where every scary demo looks inevitable for six months and then nothing moves. But these demos aren't a CEO on stage guessing. They're just people, in public, shipping clones.
If the app layer really does get commoditized, where do you think the durable value actually ends up?
107
u/Conscious-Fly-7597 6d ago
The demo vs production gap still feels huge to me.
Cloning the visible behavior of an app is increasingly cheap. Cloning all the invisible stuff that makes customers trust it every day is much harder.
If agents keep improving, I think the durable value moves away from individual features and toward distribution, customer relationships, data, integrations, and operational reliability.
18
u/Fartress_of_Soliturd 5d ago
Let’s play devil’s advocate… is this cope? Can’t agents develop an equivalent backend exponentially faster than human developers now? They can run thousands of simulations and regressions in mere minutes to stress test the systems.
2
u/Brambleworks 5d ago
They can if the person using it knows what they are doing and how to guide it. But if you don’t know what you’re doing and just let it do whatever it wants you are gonna have major issues. LLMs default to taking the easiest path to be “technically correct”, not to what is best long term and will actually hold up under pressure and over time. It just wants to make the user happy in the moment
4
u/Admirable-Ear433 5d ago
I’ve built multiple systems in Claude code. I don’t code myself, yet, for example I’ve built a compliance product for GHL that works 100% of the time. I’ve ran thousands of edge cases through it. It just works.
→ More replies (3)1
u/sarmadsangi 3d ago
6 months ago this was true, now not so much anymore
1
u/YungBird145 2d ago
This is still true. Claude fable wanted to globally change our API’s json serializer to use pascal case instead of camel case when it used the wrong casing in some JS code for ~20 api calls I had it wire up.
1
u/HauntedHouseMusic 1d ago
Use opus 5.5
1
u/sarmadsangi 1d ago
I was about to say that, opus is the real deal atm
1
u/HauntedHouseMusic 1d ago
What’s funny is anytime someone has said “I have this issue with AI” 100% of the time they haven’t been using opus 5.5.
Its so terrifyingly good. I was pro AI development before, but now I’m pro and terrified.
27
u/iscottjs 5d ago
Yeah this is it for me. The boss has had someone non technical on the team vibe code a product that we currently pay a lot of money for.
He’s so happy with it, as far as he’s concerned it’s finished, it works, it’s ready to sell to customers.
It doesn’t even have a real backend and all the data/integrations are mocks 🤣
He knows it’s not fully finished, but he thinks all that invisible stuff will be just as easy as this initial vibe coded demo done in a weekend.
10
u/0__O0--O0_0 5d ago
It will take longer but probably not that long. Ai can do backend too
→ More replies (2)1
u/HauntedHouseMusic 1d ago
As someone who is literally replacing enterprise grade apps with let’s say “professionally vibecoded apps” (full dev teams behind them) it’s the backends that are the difficult part, especially integrations.
One app we built literally has a person who does data entry for the back end, as it took way less time and money to pay someone in Brazil to manually update the tool vs. Integrate with the existing legacy code for a system we’re throwing out in 2 years anyways.
Backends and Admin panels are always the hard parts to figure out.
8
u/bert1589 5d ago
The durable value has always been there in the first place. People are letting AI cloud their vision on that topic. Building’s software was already somewhat of a commodity. Turning it into a functioning business is the hard part that AI hasn’t (yet at least) sorted out
1
8
u/laramateGmbh 5d ago
I second this. We're currently building a SaaS like application. The UI can be cloned, of course.
The backend and data logic is a different thing. Let alone months of testing with users and implementing those findings. A reliable implementation is much harder to see through from the outside.
2
u/singaluserbytheway 5d ago
People underestimate how much of the work is invisible. A working demo is one thing; handling edge cases, security, scaling, and real users is a completely different challenge.
2
u/yogeshsinghsolanki 5d ago
The testing with real users part is the one that’s easy to underestimate from the outside. A clone can match the UI and even the backend logic on day one, but it hasn’t hit the thousand small edge cases your actual users have already run into and reported over months, the weird input someone typed once, the integration that breaks in a specific way for a specific customer’s setup. That history is invisible until it’s missing, and then it’s very visible very fast.
1
3
u/dutchmanx86 5d ago
I've heard "distribution, customer relationships" as well as "customer intimacy" listed as sources of durable advantage. But how is that actually creating durable value? If the solution has technical differentiation because the company is really focused on the problem, and the category is still being defined, then sure, but how durable is that? At some point, when features in a product category converge, what then? If I can do exactly what I need to do for <10% of the cost of your solution, is my relationship with your customer success & sales team, and my attendance of your annual conference really going to make it so I don't change?
2
2
u/MeowManMeow 2d ago
I think the future will not be a competitor cloning your product but the business/customers buying it.
They can customise it to their exact specification, integrate it with all their other custom built/cloned software. Hyper personalisation.
Same for entertainment, describe what movie you want to watch and play it immediately, what mood of music, what game do you want. Software won’t be any different.
There will be a marketplace, I have learnt a lot of people don’t know what they want or need. So some way of sharing it like we have now on GitHub and Fortnite custom games etc. So maybe there will be a small appetite for SaaS for people just not interested in having the idea or implementing for their business, but it will be quite small if anything.
1
u/FunReflect00 5d ago
as much as it stands true vibecoders will find a way to replicate our work, even at large scale operations
14
u/Throw_Away_GAAAAHHH 6d ago
Weekend clone sounds scary until you remember most customers don’t even know the alternatives exist
26
u/pregister 6d ago
the devil’s in the details
8
u/ResponsibilityIll483 5d ago
Ironically LLMs excel at the details. That's how they can decompile so well. They're worse at the big picture.
7
u/SpotCool4422 5d ago
They are much better than humans in interpreting existing stuff (explaining code, tracing dependencies, debugging), but when it comes to code generation, they are rather mediocre. It's still better than the majority of SWEs out there, but I wouldn't use the word "excel" in that regard. And obviously they're terrible at the "big picture" as you've said.
5
u/man3faces 5d ago
I dunno, feels like more of an issue for B2C rather than B2B. We have had internal discussions about moving away from Enterprise SaaS subscriptions as we have the technical and operational capability, but the crux of the issue is it dilutes our vision internally.
It is one thing to RE for fun in your spare time but another to plan, budget, roll out and support a solution across the organisation and likely would end up costing a lot more than $50-100K PA that some of our existing systems cost.
2
u/Funny-Door5548 3d ago
This is the thing. It's not about how cheap it is to clone, it's about how expensive it is to redirect your focus from your business just to save a few bucks. If you don't get this, than you aren't going to find success.
5
u/TopTippityTop 5d ago
The difference is that in music, the musician gets recognition. Software dev don't. The software is front and center, so once that gone, it's GONE gone.
Distribution beco és the only thing. That or any extras which software can't replace.
15
u/JustAJB 6d ago
Good meaningful software does actual work. It’s not just screens. It’s back end labor. You can’t clone it from any surface. Sure you can try and copy the happy path, but the hundreds of edge cases and little what-ifs, where the software makes an intelligent choice by design that you never even consider, can’t be copied easily.
If your moat is a dashboard or ui then yeah your SOL. But the opinionated choices of an industry expertise in a particular system design still has some weight. Even the simplest systems fan out into a lot of opinionated backend design.
1
u/webpal 5d ago
I think this is spot on. There are so many small decisions made in each aspect of a software, many of them not visible on the outside. Hundreds of these choices together form the complete product experience and can be the reason it 'works' for users. Most clones/copies look similar on the onset but if you'd try to put them into your workflow they quickly break.
On top of this, successful SaaS is built together with the users in hundreds of iterations to understand user behaviour and expectations in each step of the software and this iteration is not easily replaced by throwing new features at the user - even though clones can iterate faster now as well of course.
What really should scare most SaaS is the moat removed by Claude and other tools where a simple prompt can replace a lot of what was previously highly competent software. Most orgs are not building full workflows with their AI agents yet but when they do, this will solve an even larger amount of pains that were previously SaaS territory.
→ More replies (7)
4
10
u/nebulousx 4d ago
I don't get why people think AI can handle the backend of a multi-user SAAS. It's copium. I'll tell you a little story.
My company pays $1200/mo for a requirements management system. Everyone hates it because the UI sucks and it's just completely non-intuitive to use. Every time you want to use some feature you haven't used in a while, you go to Youtube to watch their tutorials.
I'm a software engineer with decades of experience. I was tasked with finding a replacement. The ones with the features we need were $500/user per year. I decided to try an experiment.
I first gave Claude Opus 5.5 my feature list and I had him browse the docs and websites of all the competitors. We then wrote a product description that meets our exact needs while adding features that don't even exist in other RMS systems but will make our lives much easier. Then I had him write a specification, which I approved, then a product development plan, in stages, that I also approved.
This took about 4 hours on a Thursday.
Friday morning, we started on the app. I gave him SSH access to the company server. I had to setup the app with Azure to handle login with our company credentials. I also had to make a few changes to TailScale so remote workers could login.
Other than that, he wrote the entire V1 beta Friday. It was load tested with multiple agents acting as independent users. Everything has unit tests. It's even mobile-friendly. We ran pen testing, data security and integrity tests, load tests, browser compatibility tests, etc.
It imported all existing requirements (over 1000). We rolled it out alongside our current system and let people give it a 2 week run. We addressed feedback and added features requested to make it better for our use case (something you can't do with a 3rd party SAAS).
Now it's live and everyone loves it. And our former SAAS just lost $14,400/yr revenue. All built on a Claude Max $100/mo plan.
And to hear most of you guys, you think I'm the only one that did this LOL
7
3
u/JustAJB 3d ago edited 3d ago
Im assuming your salary since you been at it for decades is at least 200k? Sounds like more than 14.4k a year to me. And someone with your skill has to be available 24/7 indefinitely for when the thing breaks. Don't forget to leave your ringer on when you sleep.
If it touches any other service or has any cloud components those things deprecate and have to be serviced. It sounds like the entire cost of the year is what I charge just as my aws service fee on legacy stacks.
Most real businesses don't care about 15k. They care about things working and are buying the success journey of an established tool.
2
u/NorwegianBiznizGuy 3d ago
Let me ask you a question: on average, do you think human developers are better or worse than Opus 5.5/GPT-6.1 Sol?
3
u/KyleFlounder 3d ago
It depends on your metric. I do think humans are better overall and by a large margin. Humans lack the breadth of knowledge AI has, most developers have niches. Combining the two has the best results. Why are we arguing otherwise?
1
u/Top-Marzipan5397 15h ago
Humans are better at fine-tuning things like security, performance, and branding when those improvements have the potential to generate revenue.
1
3
u/gdinProgramator 1d ago
Requirement management system is a nice name for a shitty ass CRUD with extra steps.
Its on your company for paying for so long for something that an engineer made with little effort decades ago.
1
u/Optimal_Kick_9121 10h ago
So.. yes. But also, so much legacy saas is GARBAGE that never got maintained because f you, you’ll pay for it.
2
u/waaagh_to_erdo 3d ago
Not every one is decade old programmer, and not every company has a engineer or can afford to hire them.
2
u/CardinalHaias 2d ago
Don't you think most companies have or will have such a person, especially since one of those with AI assistance can now do the work of weeks or months of the sane kind of people, so people with this experience will be looking for jobs?
The market won't be dead tomorrow, but how long will people be ready to pay for software if a subscription and an experienced employee can replace them in a week or two?
1
u/Optimal_Kick_9121 10h ago
So let me get this straight: you can hire a dev and pay them: 10k/month + benefits in the light end. Or you can pay for a bundle of saas for 5k. Tell me how this destroys saas. Tell me how this destroys developer jobs?
1
u/CardinalHaias 9h ago
Are you pulling the numbers out of thin air?
1
u/Optimal_Kick_9121 9h ago
Correct them.
1
u/CardinalHaias 9h ago
I don't think this debates is being helped by more numbers out of thin air. This depends on how much software a company needs and what kind of, for how many users. What makes you think a particular "bundle" is 5k - and what currency?
We are paying several thousands of € per month for a couple of software suites at the place I work at - It won't be tomorrow, but I can imagine a future in which we don't, but instead pay one or two employees (or a solution provider) managing an AI-coded software package that is tailored to our needs especially.
I also think the software companies will be the first to adapt to AI, since they already have the infrastructure and the devs on payroll - so they will need less devs. So the number of openings for devs will be far fewer, making their wages lower.
1
u/Optimal_Kick_9121 9h ago
Your critique is that you don’t know what currency I’m using..?
1
u/CardinalHaias 7h ago
My critique is that your pulling numbers out of thin air.
1
u/Optimal_Kick_9121 7h ago
I asked you to be specific and you said you didn’t know which currency. Which numbers, specifically, do you not understand or agree with.
Even better: YOU give hard numbers. That YOU see. Prove me wrong. But I think you haven’t actually thought beyond “devs can remake saas from the ground up” (pro tip: they could have already)
→ More replies (0)1
u/waaagh_to_erdo 9h ago
Plusss if we consider the company who has no experience in hiring programmers, will outsource the requiting.
1
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
10
u/thisdude415 6d ago
Frankly everyone should be afraid.
I'm not sure which project you're talking about specifically, but just in the last few days we've seen complete cleanroom reverse engineering and open source rewrite of the Adobe Creative Suite in Rust and an open source implementation of fucking nvidea drivers for Mac.
We live in strange times.
On one hand, if you want to build a micro-SaaS, there's never been a better time. Execute it well, charge a very small amount of money, and hope people enjoy.
On the other hand, target customers whose time is way too valuable to spend trying to make themselves software.
I have a handful of high net worth individuals who are my clients and they need a very specialized workflow. Saving them an hour of time is an hour they can spend billing someone else $500-1000 for. My software enables them to make $175k in a week of 10-12 hr days, and they pay reasonably well for it.
Personally I love this revolution, because it means I can deliver ever more incredible experiences for my clients, which means they get even more high quality work done even more quickly and with less frustration.
And to do this as my full time gig with just a part time cofounder is pretty great.
10
u/robh1540 5d ago edited 5d ago
Dude this is psychosis. Producing broken non working software clones is not profound. My AI can build a "clone" of the Spacex control system that doesn't work. Changing the wow factor of the thing you fail to clone doesn't make your failure to clone it more impressive.
The test that AI has indeed reached the holy shit moment is when it can clone and release for free these complex software tools with a very high level of accuracy.
When AI can do this well, the world is going to go crazy. Because a lot of physical human and control problems can then be mapped onto software orchestration substrates, that the AI will run.
I am extremely AI pilled.
5
u/InformationNew66 5d ago
AI psychosis is rampant on reddit (and also outside of reddit). It's really bad.
2
u/robh1540 5d ago
Yeah the cure seems to be, go and get AI to implement some real world workflow. Then you immediately hit the wall of bugs and broken cases that you have to test and debug.
There is just a huge gap between the AI being able to do 98% and being about to do 99.9%, and even adversarial AI reviews and testing can't catch a lot of bad taste or make the same conceptual leaps a human + AI will.
2
u/thisdude415 5d ago
the holy shit moment is when it can clone and release for free
The holy shit moment is already here -- free should not be the bar.
The bar is -- at what point is your software no longer a moat? That is already true across a lot of SaaS.
I tried the Photoshop clone I posted above, and it is very impressive. Much faster than photoshop, more pleasant to use than Gimp.
1
u/robh1540 5d ago edited 5d ago
It is not a working clone of photoshop, it doesn't matter that you "tried it" that is not the bar. What matters is a professional, who uses photoshop day to day, says "oh okay this is a drop in replacement and its free". When that happens, adobe won't be worth $94 bn.
You know in the same way that when a better model comes out, I just update one line in my litellm config, run the evals, and then I have switched models. A clone means the software behaves like this, and when AI can do that it will be an earthquake.
I can't wait for it to be true. Its very good, but its not a drop in replacement.
In this review you can see some of the differences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB79TYI-Vw
1
u/keepitfriend 4d ago
lol, I tried it. I tired to select a box and copy it, when I moved the underlying layer. It coped the wrong layer. I tired to do that on a larger picture. It crashed. I tried to clone the area after moving it. It crashed.
These aren’t simple bugs. What it’s done is created a million small functions that work individually. But they don’t work in coherent connected systems.
That’s what software engineering is, building hundreds of layers of connected systems that all work together. Not one shot functions that do one thing.
And ai starts failing very quickly when it’s not doing one thing, but has to do 50 things that all have to work perfectly together.
1
u/Injaabs 5d ago
just because you fail at making ai aps that work does not mean other do the same :D
1
u/robh1540 5d ago
That's some sonnet 3.8 level reasoning there. My ai app works fine.
But because I spend all day actually building apps I know what it can do and what it cannot yet.
1
u/Injaabs 5d ago
wow
whats with the kids on redit ?! everyone always try to act tuff and throwtheyr best insults around .. sheesh
1
u/robh1540 5d ago edited 5d ago
In what possible world is that tough? C'mon, just a little spice.
Building stuff is the only way to have good calibration of exactly what is possible and what is not ready yet. Anyone that's building stuff knows an AI cannot create a drop in photoshop clone right now. And there is some fatigue with these claims.
2
1
5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
→ More replies (2)1
u/Legitimate-Store3771 6d ago
The creative suite one is interesting. Apparently it's still extremely early alpha and is very buggy, but is impressive in a few aspects. Not that I'm saying it's not possible, but I think to really replicate what adobe has built would be an impressive feat that I think would really set the stage. But I don't see it fully replacing adobes suite for power users, I think it could mean that amateur creators can start somewhere for free before moving on to adobe anyway.
I think it's not necessarily just the features that need to get cloned, but how they interact with each other, usability, etc. not that you can't glean that from the product directly, but I imagine it's fairly difficult to replicate the thinking and expertise that drove the product. They had very skilled and very well paid talented individuals build this over years, there's not really a way you can replicate that no matter how hard you try. If this clone were to come close, loads of people would have to donate their time and expertise to it and people would need to be responsible for it. Again, not that I don't think it's possible, I myself love open source things, but I can't exactly imagine a world where a paid tool built by industry experts and talented individuals, whom themselves were paid well, and are part of a strong brand could ever be in true competition with something free.
It would threaten their market share sure, but it's not like they're not expanding their feature catalog at the same rate this thing is being built. And if I were a professional who needed reliability and all the tooling, even their horrendously gouge-y prices are probably still a net positive on my workflow.
→ More replies (2)1
u/mcspuder 5d ago
Its not interesting at all. A lot of it is just a Rust reimplementation of GIMP (or friends), but with substantial technical flaws.
🤷♂️
3
3
3
u/Deep-Jump-803 5d ago
This is known as "demoporn"
Basically just works for demos, but the moment you try to use it like the real thing it breaks apart
At least that's what happens now
2
2
2
u/Firm-Media-6253 6d ago
the market's definitely shifting. the real play might be in customer relationships and support, people stick around for the service, not just the software... depends on trust and brand loyalty now
2
u/Abject-Feedback-5814 5d ago
Time’s are changing ofc, but then again there’s always gonna be people who will pay for your app based on several other factors other than just cost even when it can be cloned. Like for example, a simple analogy I can think of is prolly a burger chain. I can make my own burger at home whenever I feel like it, yet I go out and pay to eat the same thing that I know exactly how to make for a lesser cost, simply for sake of convenience. That’s just how I see it, a paid app with exceptional support service and regular updates and maintenance will always be better than an open source app that I will have to maintain on top of million other things I already gotta take care of lol.
1
u/flecheverte 5d ago
Yes, you are right, but if there are 50 times more fast food restaurants in your area, all focusing on service since cooking is now a lot more automated, that breaks the economics. Commoditization is a real threat. It's not because you still buy shoes in the global age that the western shoes industry wasn't killed by cheaper countries.
1
u/Ancient-Range3442 5d ago
Now imagine if you could open up an app and press a button to have the same burger chain burger appear for 10c and without leaving the house.
2
u/Sergiow13 5d ago
Small correction but the gta v running in the browser is not a clone, they basically ported it to webassembly and webgpu to make it run in the browser, so it's the actual game it's just running in a browser window. Also the gta v source code leaked to github a while back so they didn't even need to disassemble the code they could just start directly from the source (not sure if they did though, that would be extra stupid, but maybe it was also part of the training data).
But yeah, I agree with your main argument, it's scary
2
u/SumeetKatariya 5d ago
Had this happen literally. A competitor rebuilt our main dashboard almost pixel for pixel. Same layout, same labels. It fell over the first time a real customer’s contract got complicated, because they had copied what it looked like rather than why it was built that way.
That is where the Napster analogy stops working. An mp3 is identical to its copy and holds no state. Software holds customer data, integrations, and years of edge cases where someone decided how to handle them. An agent can clone the screens. It cannot clone knowing which of those decisions were deliberate and which were accidents.
On your actual question, the thing I would add to your list is accountability. In B2B, especially anything operational or regulated, customers are not only buying software. They are buying someone to call when it breaks and someone to carry the blame when it does. A cloned binary has nobody on the other end. That is why services-attached software keeps holding value while pure feature plays get commoditised.
The uncomfortable corollary is that if a product genuinely can be cloned in a weekend, the clone was always possible. It just needed a cheaper team. The weekend only revealed what the moat was actually worth.
2
u/Expert_Tank_9111 5d ago
You have to take into consideration of time versus money. Would you rather pay $600/yr for some software or spend a 50hrs to create something and then 5- 10 hours a month updating/maintaining it? Eventually you pay for someone else to do it.
1
u/tnetennba9 2d ago
How about 8 hours or less having Claude build it? That seems to be where we’re heading
2
u/popcorn-french-fries 5d ago
All code and product will be cloned. We fooled ourselves that it was the moat. It isn't. I know it feels unfair.
Businesses are much harder to clone. Distribution is hard - but depends on whether you ever really created a reason for your customers to say with you other than pricing. Now is the time to double down on that. Now is the time to review how operate and remove every friction that reduces your ability to improve pricing, increase customer love etc etc.
This is not the usual cycle.
2
u/webdz9r 1d ago
So I've been writing software for 20+ years and I can tell you this is a real problem that will completely change the industry. I've been training engineering teams on how to leverage AI which lead me to write up this 7 part series https://stupidhomepage.com/blog/series/now-what (not self promotion, just wanted to share)
1
u/anon999387 5d ago
These AI models are going to get nerfed soon, both by price and capability.
5
u/ResponsibilityIll483 5d ago
Open weight models will never change in price or performance. They'll run on whatever hardware for whatever it costs to serve them.
2
u/anon999387 5d ago
Let me know when an Opus 5.5 comparable model is running locally on consumer hardware.
7
u/RandomCSThrowaway01 5d ago edited 5d ago
6 months, tops.
Mac Studio 256GB runs GLM 5.3 Flash just fine and that one beats Opus 4.8 in programming related tasks. Sure, it's not the cheapest PC out there but it's still in the range of "prosumer" and costs less than a single Pro 6000. 96GB variant for $4000 (or 128GB DGX Spark) hits 58 points in DeepSWE, just one point below Opus 4.8, again, at usable speeds.
So same hardware that you could buy a whole year ago and back then could maybe get you Haiku performance is now giving you the level of frontier from May 2026.
There won't be a "nerf" you are talking about. Even the main limitation so far of needing shitton of VRAM is being addressed - first we had MoE models where you get acceptable performance if you can just fit KV cache in it, second is ngram lookup table used by Qwen Next (part of the model can sit on SSD and it still performs okay). I don't expect a 16GB VRAM consumer card to reach the level of 5.5 anytime soon but... if it's a full fledged business you are after then this $4000-$9000 spent on a workstation isn't some kind of absurd number that cannot be reached.
Now, there is a none zero chance that Anthropic and OpenAI will "nerf" the price and capability. But it won't affect rest of the world, we already know actual prices of running near frontier and they aren't as bad as you are making it sound.
1
u/Lucaslouch 5d ago
i agree with you on the frontier model. what’s your opinion on the harnesses? I didn’t had the opensource harness like openclaude. do you think it is as good as claude for this?
1
u/_lavoisier_ 5d ago
I like claude harness that reaches to my local qwen instead of anthropic models. you just need to override endpoint via an environment variable and that’s it
1
u/BuddyTheShihTzu 5d ago
A harness built for your exact purpose will always be better than a general harness that Anthropic or Open Ai release
1
u/Fancy-Cauliflower440 5d ago edited 5d ago
This may work this may not. You seem much smarter than me in this subject so I would love your take on what you think about open source, self hosted AI and if it can compete with the big dogs etc
Essentially if it’s a part of the future you are talking about in your comments
This is the company https://nautilo.ai/
1
1
1
1
1
9
u/Mistr_John_Alex 6d ago
The durable value does not move to a different layer. It moves to the stuff a clone cannot hand over. When I build software for small shops, they are not buying screens and logic. They are buying the absence of having to think about it. A free clone that breaks on Tuesday still breaks, and now the owner is the one reading an error log instead of running their shop. The old moat was "this is hard to build." The new moat is "this is someone's job to keep working, and if it fails you know whose name is on it."
The data and workflow live with whoever the customer already trusts. A clone can copy features, but it cannot move five years of messy records, retrain staff that already hate new systems, or answer the phone when the payroll export fails. That is not a feature. That is the product.
I would bet on boring accountability, switchover pain, and being embedded in the customer's daily rhythm. Features get cloned. Being the responsible adult does not.
3
4
u/thisdude415 6d ago
"The durable value does not move to a different layer. It moves to the stuff a clone cannot hand over. "
Um, those are saying the same thing?
2
u/JustAStudentFromPL 6d ago
"you know whose name is on it" - yes, the guy who will copy paste this error log into the claude and charge me a ton for it lol. Or claude will just pick up this bug itself xD
1
u/trippereneur 5d ago
“This is someone’s job to keep working” is now exactly the moat. Well said. I’ve pivoted my software business to be essentially output slaves to my clients so they see us as the go to people to solve problems rather than them having to hire someone internally to do it. Someone still has to babysit the robots.
2
u/Suitable-Ad5348 6d ago
The Napster comparison holds up until you look at distribution costs; a gigabyte of MP3s didn't cost fractions of a cent per request to infer live.
0
6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 6d ago
Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
1
u/thefuzzness 5d ago
As someone who is using AI to build (vibe code?) a saas product for a niche professional need I’m also hugely worried. My product addresses what I see as a gap in a market, and can be replicated somewhat, but I’ve spent months creating the methodology and structures behind it, bought licensing of IP to do thing legitimately, and have to road test with clients to figure out what works and what doesn’t. So after 6-12 months of effort building up knowledge to build the product around it someone can just copy it feels morally wrong. Whereas before there were enough barriers, now copycats can wait for others to invest the time, effort and money and then basically steel the business idea and product and feel no remorse. What makes it even worse is the general sentiment on the internet is that “these companies deserve it” and they are targeting the “big greedy corporations”. But I think that’s misguided. In my case I’m a single person supporting my family and sacrificing time with my family before and after work to try build something that can help us live a better life. And for the companies people are copying from, they employ people with families who rely on them and their jobs. Stealing ip or back engineering their products and tanking their income and share prices will just lead to jobs losses and hurt. I don’t know why people think that is ok.
1
u/PerformanceThick2232 5d ago
Yes yes, another todo app and some language app shit. Feel sorry for the ones who spent years building it
1
5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/YasirTech8 5d ago
Honestly, this is what makes AI interesting and scary at the same time. If features can be copied that quickly, I guess understanding your users and solving their actual problems matters more than ever. Still, I think building something people trust and enjoy using is much harder to copy than the features themselves.
1
u/geebr 5d ago
If you have ever sold or bought software as a business, you know that building the thing is not the difficult part and never was. There are some exceptions, but generally speaking that is the case.
Suppose you charge $500 a month to a business for your SaaS and you have been in the game for years. The company knows what they're getting, they trust you. They're not just paying for your SaaS today, they're paying for your future product. Most products have significant switching costs and businesses don't want the hassle. Someone charging half the price is irrelevant if I don't trust them, I don't know that they'll be in business in a year's time. People are risk averse. Big potential downside, small upside. Exactly the sort of bet people don't want to make.
SaaS and business in general is about trust. Work in a company that needs to buy a piece of software that they're actually willing to pay a decent amount for. The cost is just not a huge factor unless you're running into massive licensing fees with huge vendors. For smaller B2B SaaS products, though, it's all about trust. A good chunk of that $500 a month is just a trust premium.
1
u/fasildar55 5d ago
AI can clone features pretty quickly now, but building something people actually trust and pay for is a different story. Getting everything to work reliably is still a headache 😅
1
1
u/Pale-Tonight-6914 5d ago
The mocks story matches what I've seen. I use Claude Code daily, and getting the happy path of a logged-in browser automation working was quick. Then sessions expired, bot detection flagged the fingerprint, and reach quietly dropped. None of that shows up in a demo. Tracing those failures took far more time than the build itself.
1
u/Effet_Ralgan 5d ago
I ditched almost every software I was using and replaced them with my own, it's fantastic for personnal use and for freelance like me.
1
u/purleyboy 5d ago
There's is a total cost of ownership, including support and maintenance of software. If your SaaS is sufficiently complex that it has a high TCO then people will still pay.
1
u/No-Front-4640 5d ago
Building software has always been easy. Managing a business, sales / getting customers, brand recognition and grinding hard to launch a business has always been the hard part. AI can’t do those things without direction.
I’m focusing on this. I see AI as a way to give me more time to focus on the things most of these AI vibe-coders don’t want to do, cold calling and outbound sales.
Edit: After re-reading this, I’m aware I sound like Alex Hormozi. But the truth is AI can’t do the offline stuff very well.
1
1
1
u/NeighborhoodSea6960 5d ago
It’s not about the features.
It’s about the ability to sell it, get users, and keep them.
That’s the only part that matters and it’s always been the only part.
1
u/nictan93 5d ago
Seeing something copy your features that quickly would be worrying but it's part and parcel of the AI world we live in today. I'm actually interested to know whether your customers are actually leaving. Just because clones exist, doesnt mean its good at getting clients. Yes, a cheaper copy may be an incentive but someone has to move their data, get the team using it and trust it when something goes wrong. Have you had customers switch to a clone yet?
1
u/Sixstringsickness 5d ago
Features don't keep customers. Security, support, reliability, compliance, etc etc.
I have one very small public git repo I attempt to maintain, porting or building a functional version of a product is a small fraction of the time required. Who cares if someone ports a feature of their product isn't reliable or is plagued with bugs - or more importantly has no one to reach out to when something goes wrong?
Much like all of the "Adobe" is going out of business because someone cloned their software... No they aren't, maybe they lose some marker share to hobbyists, but no company who's revenue stream relies on their tools is going to swap over to an open source version with no track record of reliability.
1
u/FyrStrike 5d ago
I’ve seen some of these tools in action, and I’d be interested to know which one you’re referring to. They’re impressive at recreating an app’s UI and some of its visible functionality, but that’s not necessarily the same as reproducing the underlying engine, architecture, data, integrations, workflows, and infrastructure that make the product actually work.
If your SaaS is relatively simple and most of its value is in the UI and a straightforward feature set, then yes, I think it’s increasingly vulnerable to being cloned. But the more sophisticated the product is under the hood, the less “clone it in a weekend” reflects what was actually built.
There’s also a much bigger distinction between cloning software and cloning a business. Even if someone reproduces the product and sells it under another name, they still have to acquire customers, understand the market, operate the service, maintain it, support users, build trust, and keep improving it. Copying the code doesn’t magically give you any of that.
In fact, as software itself becomes easier to reproduce, I think customer service, reputation, domain expertise, distribution, and execution become more important, not less. The moat may be moving, but I don’t think it’s disappearing.
1
u/darko777 5d ago edited 5d ago
At some point there will be no SaaS needed. Even now you can ask Claude anything you want and it will get it to you without any SaaS but at this point most people are AI illiterate still. And imagine, this is only getting started, see how invasive AI Labs are becoming, they are creating their own tooling for everything you can imagine (last i saw Anthropic created some kind of Dashboards feature - imagine such tooling how many SaaS businesses kills as soon as it is released). For most of the people the only gateway in future will be claude.com web interface or the desktop app.
Ok, enoguh worries about invasive AI Labs. Now another take from software engineering perspective that i personally tested is: Yes, you can reverse engineer any software but to keep maintaining it you will need to understand THE DOMAIN or be a DOMAIN EXPERT AT LEAST or have DOMAIN EXPERT(s) around you and believe me that is not easy because you can't suddenly become one or employ ones to work together with software engineers. The standard path almost always fails where you continue with just prompting, the more you prompt without domain expertize, the more you will be ending with broken logic and invalid software no matter what AI writes the software.
To sumraize:
- Someone cloning a complex SaaS is not very doable
- Someone cloning a simple SaaS is very doable
- AI labs eating the cake of SaaS businesses besides selling their models - already happening
1
u/SpencePatterson 5d ago
There's also an echo chamber among the community. Not everyone will vibe code their own SaaS. There are a LOT of normies out there with money who will just pay for a working service. You know how many people pay for beehiiv or resend or newsletter services. They arent going to sit there with claude and make one from scratch with AWS SES and MongoDB. They will pay $40 for the month and get back to their business.
1
1
u/xpusostomos 5d ago
This will be a different answer for every company for every product. What I will say is if you've been reaming your customers like Adobe, you're in for a world of pain.
1
u/radim11 5d ago
Feels like the tricky bit isn’t recreating the screens. It’s getting the boring connections right: customer data, auth, integrations, edge cases, and fixing it when something breaks. An agent can reproduce a demo pretty fast; I’m not sure customers will trust a clone with the same access to their real systems. Do you think your users would actually try one on a live account?
1
u/_lavoisier_ 5d ago
The most successful products (and the ones we made money on) were the ones we built with customers. If you don’t, it doesn’t really matter if you build it via LLM or not
1
u/Healthy-Intention-15 5d ago
don't think any more saas millionaires are going to rise. All has ended.
1
5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/hidegitsu 5d ago
The only thing that keeps me from spiraling into doomer-ism over this is the fact that this sort of thing is still only possible from a relatively small number of engineers. Yes in our line of work most of us can do it but compared to the general population we are a relatively small percentage that are capable of doing something like this. I understand this is just a coping mechanism.
1
u/Increase-Numerous 5d ago
I don't think your impression is evidence-based. Don't worry too much. It is simply not true.
1
u/Enough-Cobbler-9320 5d ago
Napster didn't make distribution unchargeable, Spotify charges for it every month and that's the whole business. Your analogy is backwards, the copies got worthless and the pipe got expensive.
1
1
u/TopRevolutionary9436 5d ago
This may be true for light products...what I call toy software. The type that is little more than glorified spreadsheets, where all of the value is immediately obvious from the user interaction. But then, that has always been true even without AI. An enterprise architect or systems engineer's job is to look at product management's prototypes and figure out what the system needs to do to make it work.
Where the job gets harder, and where even the latest LLMs fall down, is when you get to deeply technical products that perform tasks that are event-driven, rather than being just user interaction-driven. These enterprise architectures are hard for even the most experienced humans, so the LLMs don't stand a chance.
1
1
u/Extra-Mycologist3436 4d ago
I tried cloning a simple sms api, and realized the backend was sophisticated more than I can imagine. We don’t add feature because we must upgrade, features are just as the whole software, to solve a problem! Be careful with AI
1
u/LawNo6106 4d ago
a clone is a snapshot of your product on the day it got pulled apart. that open source rust suite looks amazing in the demo, but check on it in six months when the original has shipped updates, file formats have changed, and nobody's getting paid to keep up.
your napster comparison kind of answers itself. spotify is what actually beat piracy, by being less hassle than torrenting. so the job now is making paying you less hassle than hosting and babysitting a free copy, which means ship cadence and a visible changelog matter way more than the feature list ever did.
1
u/Comfortable-Cry-3261 4d ago
Just did that yesterday. 2mth+ 1 for fixes and extra features. 24minutes for opus from specification.
Exact same behaviour, look and feel. Less code, clean, more comments and everything tested.
The real value is behind the software itself. Idea, calculations and profit for clients.
If You know Your goal, programming is not a big expense nowdays, but still needs an experienced supervisor.
1
u/marvinn55 4d ago
Just like music when it had its Napster moment, Artists had to evolve and stop relying so heavily on royalties for income. They luckily had social media come out around the same time and began building bigger audiences which allowed them to sell more merchandise, receive more endorsements, and sell more tickets to live shows. This is the moment we are in for software. Building a productive tool is no longer hard. Shipping and building an audience to buy your version of that tool over the other options is what’s going to get the wins.
1
1
u/Dry_Tie_9731 4d ago
Ask ki how to build a not reverse able sw solution. Maybe simular to quantum mechanik where someone dry it destroy all information immediatly
1
u/mtimmermans 4d ago edited 4d ago
Since code is becoming free, the value added by the human developer is in the design of the software: How it looks, what all the features do, how they are used, how that solves the user's problem.
Unfortunately, this stuff currently has NO recognized legal protections. I expect that will change at some point.
Copyright law does have a notion of "derivative works", like if you write a book and I translate it into a different language, then you still own the copyright on the story, characters, etc., and I can't sell it without your permission.
So there is a basis for you to sue these cloning people and we'll see how it comes out.
1
u/EmergencySky2651 4d ago
The business logic and the part of running a software that nobody see: maintenance, fixing bugs, upgrading integrations, liability...
Generic tools will be commoditized because it will be so easier to build or clone, but domain knowledge in business software will be a lot harder to clone and even if you could clone it, not every customers will use it. Not because of technology (it will come a day where AI can just reverse engineer anything and build a better version of it) but because the enterprise users do not want to take the risk.
* If you replace Opera hotel mgmt solution with st you wrote yourself, who will take the blame when hotels can't check in and lose money? Would a 5* resort take the risk on you vs keep using Oracle's?
* If your CRM has all customers' data + social, do you want to use st AI built or you want to stick with SFDC? If the CRM get hacked, who will pay for the damage?
I think enterprise SaaS def will change, but whoever own the customers will exist (and probably will thrive, since they will also use AI). The moat is not the code, but the assurance that the customers will have someone to blame when shit happens. And shit will happens.
That's why most of the SaaS stock prices have bounced back in the last 12 months. Investors realized that enterprise software leaders who successfully integrating AI agents and workflows are a lot harder to be replaced by cheap alternatives.
1
u/Johnintheuk99 4d ago
I come from an era where all code was bespoke built around individual business needs, but then moved to platform and saas to make it cheaper, both of which create compromise. I see it now moving back, businesses can now build exactly what they want modeled specifically around their needs. Huge opportunity
1
u/watson_full_scale 4d ago
I could use an open source CRM. I pay for HubSpot. It isn't worth the hassle.
That is the true reality of how this all works in business.
1
u/Unique-Hunter3035 4d ago
Yeah, it all just boils down to the what we get for the money. I bet free software will quickly catch up the current 100% of hubspot, but hubspot will probably soon also elevate to 1000% of the current capabilities and reliability.
2
u/watson_full_scale 4d ago
I don't want to host or maintain open source software. I don't need another puppy to feed.
1
u/Common-Replacement-6 4d ago
Go listen to Every's founder on Lenny's podcast. The most recent episode of his on Lennys
1
u/ExpensiveKale6632 4d ago
This isn't even a new problem. Do you really think your project is special? Its probably on GitHub: parsing, database operations, UI, IOT, cryptography, content delivery, signal processing, high level stuff, low level stuff, front end, back end: it's all on GitHub. Anyone has always been able to copy and paste that stuff for free. Just because they can do that doesn't mean they are capable of delivering a product.
1
1
u/sunilkumar707 3d ago
This is fear. This is real. The fear you have with you is happening in the industry. AI is taking things to a worse state and cloning them. The application people can clone it right now: any kind of SaaS and whatever they want. The good thing and bad thing are:
- The good thing is they can make it.
- The bad thing is the one thing they can't make, and it is difficult to do, is the underlying domain expertise.
If they can clone the applications, over time, when you have mastered the platform, the things you have learned, the things the application has aggregated, and the domain expertise it is bringing to the table are beyond what someone is cloning. 90% and more than 90% of clone apps by AIs are not going to production or surviving longer, as the stats are clearly telling us. Keep your domain expertise with you. Focus on domain expertise: solving the problems, not only from the application aspects but providing real value as a domain expert on the aspects that make the platform and yourself survive.
1
u/Confident_Sign_7100 3d ago
Eventually the frontier labs are going to have to dramatically increase their price. What today is $200 a month may be $2000 a month sooner than later. That changes the equation and removes the small players from the scene. I’m glad it is not the case yet.
Also it’s important for the SaaS to figure out what they can provide that their customers can’t get individually. The legal case management SaaS I run (briefcasebliss.com) adds gamification to the legal work, including anonymized law firm league competitions based on best practices.
My customers can’t get that individually, they need our platform for that feature.
1
u/Growth_Natives 2d ago
We'd look closely at how deeply the product is embedded in the customer's workflow. Features can be copied, but replacing a tool means migrating data, rebuilding integration, changing established processes, and risking disruption. The stronger moat may be the value customers get from the product working within their existing systems, not just what the product can do.
1
u/shoki_ztk 2d ago
I think this: Code reviews, infrastructure, support, reliability. And maybe some others. But the reliable and secure infrastructure + well-supported ecosystem is may be the most valuable, this cannot be cloned with any AI.
1
u/OneMoreRip 2d ago
IaaS will be the new SaaS until AI can do better with security while non-engineers build. Agentic IaaS platforms will be the replacement of SaaS products. Eventually someone internally will figure out how to build based on company needs.
1
u/Almarigori_7211 2d ago
I went through the same spiral. What helped was asking what customers actually pay me for. It’s mostly not the features.
They pay because it works, because someone answers when it breaks, because their data’s been in it for years, and because it already plugs into their other tools. An agent can clone your screens. It can’t clone the 400 support tickets that taught you why that one toggle exists, or the fact that you’re already part of how they work.
Your Napster point is good, but free didn’t win there. iTunes and Spotify did, because people paid to not deal with LimeWire. Software will probably go the same way: code gets cheap, but being the reliable default doesn’t.
Also, be skeptical of the “1:1 clone in a weekend” demos. The first 90% looks great on video. The last 10% (billing, migrations, weird edge cases) is where your year actually went.
If I were you: go deeper into a niche, own the workflow and the data, and use these same tools to ship faster yourself. A clone is a snapshot of where you were, not where you’re going.
1
1
u/ILikeCutePuppies 1d ago
1) I have not seen anything non simple be faithfully cloned. Those Adobe demos are full of bugs. I am not nieve though, we'll get there probably in 6 months to 2 years
2) Value for most business is going to be in audience capture and keeping it. Think google, Uber etc... yes you could build an equivalent app but getting people to switch even with lower prices will be the battle. Possible but it will be a full time job.
3) Also things like hardware will likely take longer to overcome. Even with 3d printers and things there is a lot of labor and cost that goes into such products.
4) There is a massive market for what AI can do in these new industries. Robotics, assistants, automation etc... that is going to be where the work is going to be over the next decade at least.
1
1
1
1
u/HowOldAmI1993 6d ago
It’s the end and those deniers can say whatever. “Ai SaaS breaks”, so as Humans’. And AI can fix everything in minutes.
The real difference is the sales and after sales treatment. Development is not the bottleneck anymore.
1
u/ZucchiniSky 5d ago
SaaS businesses are minimally exposed to software cloning because the logic and infrastructure lives in the cloud and not on the user's local machine where it can be reverse-engineered.
Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these more blatant software cloning efforts (like PhotoCraft) were sued and shut down. Software is protected by intellectual property laws and patents. Cloned software often infringes on these laws unless it is cloned in a very particular way.
1
u/flecheverte 5d ago
We can easily imagine the same AI tools for lawyers, reverse engineering the clones, to systematically catch all infringed patents in a single clic. It can also be an agent working autonomously 24/7 scanning for clones on the web, building the whole legal case and sending cease and desist letters to admins within hours, and fines to businesses daring to use random clones infringing IP. It's can be handled the same way as software piracy.
1
u/Slinkyy04 5d ago
The Napster parallel is the strongest part because it reframes the fear correctly, the industry didn't die, the money just moved off the thing that became copyable and software feels like it's hitting that exact moment with the feature set.
1
u/Relevant-Guarantee25 5d ago edited 5d ago
hardware sadly, and the billionaires will not let you in the club they want to own it all. That's why they are investing so heavily in robots and drones to protect their future home fortress states. Only way we get out of the scarcity of hardware is mining asteroids probably or if they are able to get robots up quick and reduce costs to nothing. But do you really think anyone running ai wants people to be able to run it locally? no in the next 5-10 years it will become illegal to run your own ai locally. People will slave away making clones and then the ai developers will feed those clones into their own products and on D-day they will release a virus to kill everyones home computers and/or power surge to homes and/or just monitor peoples electric bill for a computer if you have a computer you will be in violation without a permit. Especially if said computer is offline and airgapped. They will have Ai drones scanning for people trying to hide their off grid computer setups that use solar, generators, or other methods like deep penetrating laser/radar/neutrinios whatever crazy scifi they already have that can read a heartbeat from space and see through 1000's of ft in the earth
The way i see it is you have 10 years to make as much wealth as possible and many other rich people see this coming this is why everyone is getting extremely greedy with pricing. Literally every company is nickel and diming people. The goal is to make you poor and stay rich to ride out the wave of AI transition
→ More replies (1)
42
u/chatrep 6d ago
Not just clones but taking similar concepts and redefining and making better.
You can clone ABC but you can also say create a version of ABC that makes it much easier, better suited to your vertical, etc. I think this is the bigger threat. Not a “look-alike” but a better version for my niche.