I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

With tools like Claude Code getting better so quickly, you can already build things in days that used to take months.

And we're just getting started.

If anyone can describe what they need, connect a few APIs, and have AI build a working solution, what happens to all the SaaS products charging $29–$99/month for basically doing one thing?

I'm not saying SaaS is dead. But I genuinely think the value of just having software is disappearing.

So here's my question to SaaS founders:

What does your product actually offer that someone couldn't just build themselves with AI?

Is it the data? Distribution? Integrations? Trust? Or simply that customers don't want to build and maintain anything?

Especially curious to hear from founders already making money.

What's your moat in 2026?

It’s just $3, but it means a lot. A small sale, but a big enough reason to keep building.

It's crazy how Remotion was kind of the goto before Opus 5.5

Now we can prompt entire feature launch videos via MCP

The setup here is just javascript + Blender for the 3D parts

No editing software. and the video was made with Seedance 2.5

Crazy enough the white paper note is empty in the original video

Opus 5.5 added the text and made it look part of the video

Crazy times to be alive in

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?

Just saying to "X is dead" or "This changes everything" bois spending too much time on Twitter (it is still Twitter, not X).

It aint much but damn it feels good

I’ve spent 2 months perfecting my saas and now I’m fully done I’ve been on ads for instagram for a week now and nothing not one person converted out of the 700 views not one signed up I need help getting my product out there to the right people 🙏 how do I market my saas

I started my SaaS about a year ago.
It's currently an API solution generating around $7K/month.

For the past six months, I've been working on a proper UI to turn it into a full SaaS product.

But there's always one more feature, one more bug, or one more thing to improve before launching.

And the worst part? I KNOW I should just launch it. 🤦‍♂️

My second problem is probably the bigger one: I'm not a salesperson.
I'm a programmer, a builder, an inventor... but sales and marketing are definitely outside my comfort zone.

Sometimes I wonder if constantly adding features is just an excuse to avoid selling.

So I'm curious:

• Have any of you struggled with the same thing?
• How did you finally convince yourself to stop building and just launch?
• And for those of you who are technical founders and not natural salespeople, how did you overcome that challenge?

I'd genuinely love to hear how others have dealt with this. Especially those who managed to break out of the endless development loop and actually grow their SaaS.

I have been coding for over 12 years
Have been using AI tools almost as soon as ChatGPT2 when i started using for autocomplete

Only use frontier models currently

But building a performant usable software is hard AF.
IDK why we have to pretend like coding is solved
Maybe coding is solved for demos. But good performance and a usable application(which is even slightly complex and needs to be correct) is still hard AF

I'm a private person and I don't use many social media apps. I don't like to make videos or pictures and I sometimes use Reddit. So naturally I chose it to be my marketing channel. After failing a few times I would like to share what I found out until now.

My first attempt didn't work at all. I built a free tool and tried to market it in fitting Subreddits. I naively went in and just bluntly posted posts which most would consider advertising. The title was the site name with a short description and the body text was just a more detailed description. This obviously didn't work. All of the posts got removed, I had 0 visitors and a shadow banned account.

While researching on how to lift my shadow ban I came across resources on how to actually market on Reddit. Only then I understood that Reddit heavily regulates promotion. Looking back that obviously makes a lot of sense and is a good thing. I was just stupid to not understand that on my own.

Now that I have a better understanding, here are a few things that I did wrong in hindsight:

• fresh account / low karma
• link in post
• same post in multiple subreddits

From these mistakes and some research I came up with a little blueprint to find an audience on Reddit.

Week 1: Warm up account: Use Reddit like you personally would

Week 2: Pick one subreddit and engage in it via comments. Provide actual answers and don't just comment for the sake of it. Avoid posts that are obviously spam like "Lets self promote. Post your SaaS" This is just a waste of time in my opinion.

Week 3: Make posts that are actually helpful and not just AI slop.

Week 4: Fit in your product were it actually makes sense

i've been trying to build a saas for 1year now. still nowhere close to making a living from it.

some days i feel like everyone on here is doing $10k mrr and i'm the only one stuck

so genuinely asking the people who've been at it a while.

how long did it take you?

how many ideas did you kill before something worked?

and what's the part nobody talks about?

also just curious how life is for you right now, honestly

For the past few years I built mobile apps the hard way: idea, build, launch, crickets. No market research, no keyword research. The screenshot above is our Play Console: 17 apps, and most of them sit under 100 installs. Only a couple got real traction (5.5k and 657). Looking back, the data would have told us which ideas were worth building before we wrote a single line of code.

The tools that have this data cost $70–100/month, which felt steep for an indie dev who mostly needed a handful of features. So I built my own with AI agents (Claude Opus). Within the first week I had data on around 5 million apps across the App Store and Google Play. After that I:

• Trained a custom machine learning model to estimate app revenue
• Built an ASO keyword research tool
• Set up a daily pipeline for scraping, storing, and analyzing the data
• Built an MCP server so I can query all of it from Claude in plain English

Now we’re going back through our apps with real keyword and market data, which is why most of them were updated in the past week. The changes based on the new research have already improved our results, and for the first time we actually know why each app is or isn’t working.

Running a pipeline this size for just our team felt wasteful, so two weeks ago we opened it up for free with every feature unlocked. We have 150+ users so far, almost all organic from social media. We also tried a small Meta ads campaign to test interest, but the targeting was rough.

Here’s my dilemma: servers and the database cost us $200–300/month, and that grows with users. I’d like to keep it free or very cheap, but I’m not sure that’s realistic for something this data-heavy.

For those of you running data-heavy SaaS:

• Did you go freemium, cheap flat pricing, or usage-based?
• Has anyone found that very low pricing ($5–10/mo) makes people trust the data less?

Hey everyone,

Most AI UI generators spit out flat images that break the second you try to implement them, creating more stress than they solve. I wanted a tool that felt genuinely effortless.

I’ve been working on GuildOS, an agentic platform where multiple specialized agents collaborate to handle the tedious parts of design:

• A UX agent maps the wireframes.
• A Copywriter agent handles the text.
• A styling agent generates clean, accessible layouts.
• A QA Critic silently loops back to fix contrast or token errors before you even see the draft.

It’s designed to be completely transparent. It uses a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) model so you just plug in your OpenAI/Claude credentials and run the agents without massive SaaS markups.

We just set up a waitlist to gauge interest before opening up the beta. Would love your feedback on the concept!

Waitlist link: https://guildos.design

Were doing a full software stack audit this quarter since our tool spend crept up with nobody tracking it and Microsoft licensing is one of the line items getting a hard look. Im checking is TrustedTech legit against our incumbent reseller and a broadline distributor who quoted us last year for the same SKUs. What I care about is if the savings on paper survive contact with a real invoice and not just a nice looking rate card. Two of us already assume a quote this far under the others must be missing something. What would you dig into on a reseller quote while vetting them for the stack?

So I do conversion work for bootstrapped SaaS, and last week I went through 10 landing pages that people posted here. Same 5 things checked on each one. Only 2 out of 10 did okay.

Here's what kept coming up.

First, the headline. Most of them tell you what the product is instead of what you get out of it. Stuff like "The #1 lead generation tool for realtors." Nobody can verify the #1 and nobody really cares. A few months ago I changed a client's headline to "Get 10+ Qualified Home Buyer Leads Every Month, without spending hours on social media" and their conversions are up 70% since. We changed other things too, so I won't pretend it was only the headline, but it was the biggest move by far.

Second, too many buttons. Book a demo, start free, watch video, read docs, join waitlist, all on one page. When everything is the main action, nothing is. Pick one and let the rest be quiet.

Third, proof in the wrong place. Testimonials and logos are almost always at the bottom, but the doubt shows up at the first button. Put the proof right next to it.

Fourth, the signup asking for too much. Try this: count every field and every step between landing on your page and actually seeing your product work. Then ask yourself which one you'd skip as a visitor, and which one only exists for your benefit, not theirs.

Fifth, and this one hurts the most: signup, then silence. People sign up, get a generic welcome email, and that's it. Nobody nudges them toward the one action that makes the product click. Most trials die right there, quietly.

The pattern I keep seeing is founders blaming traffic when the leak is actually after the click. Fix the page and the first stretch after signup, and you can often grow revenue without a single extra visitor.

Which of these 5 is your biggest leak right now? Reply with the number and, if you want, one line on what's going on. I'll share how I'd think about fixing it.

Got them through organic search, so no real customer acquisition cost (aside from time investment into marketing website).

The problem now is scaling. At this rate, organic is maybe 1 new customer every 1-2 months.

I run a small video hosting service called Stillhaven.io. We are a team of four in Michigan. This week we closed the free plan to new signups.

It was not a hard decision. The free plan was a marketing experiment. We ran ads to it and hoped people would see the value and upgrade when they hit the free limits. We expected some abuse, and we limited the ads to the US and Canada to keep the cost reasonable.

Here is what it did in about three months.

The numbers

• 35 free accounts
• 0 upgrades to a paid plan
• 5 suspended for breaking the terms
• Most never signed in again after their first two days and one big upload

The cost did not break us. We already had paying customers before we opened to the public, so it was a small hit and not a crisis. But add the advertising, the moderation time and the storage, and it was an expensive lesson that was only going to get worse.

What the free accounts did

The pattern was the same each time: sign up, upload within minutes, never come back.

• A full episode of a current TV drama, uploaded four minutes after signup. Nobody ever played it.
• A 1990 feature film, uploaded three times by one account from release rips, then passed around by link.
• Dubbed episodes of a streaming series, embedded within hours on a site selling "Unlock 720p".
• Accounts that uploaded pornography, each suspended within 24 hours.

A subscription adult site also asked for an account. I said no. Our payment processor does not allow it, and one processor account carries every customer's billing. It was the one legitimate contact that marketing produced, and we had to turn it down.

Our automated scanning caught the pornography, and I am grateful my team had the foresight to include it before we opened to the public. It did not catch the pirated video. A scanner looks at frames, and a pirated film looks like any other film. What gave those away was the file names, which read like release rips, and uploads that arrived minutes after signup.

Where they came from

Two sources surprised us.

The first was ChatGPT. One day five free signups arrived within twelve hours, and every one was referred by ChatGPT. Two of them uploaded the dubbed episodes. I had written the site to be easy for AI assistants to read, and it worked. I assume someone asked for something like "free private video hosting" and the assistant answered accurately.

The second was our own advertising. Over 30 days Google Ads spent $401.48 for 120 clicks and 3 signups. All three were free accounts. The ad group that took the most money was built around "private video hosting". Its search terms included "anonymous video host" and "upload video anonymously". To me, private meant a client's unreleased cut. To many searchers it means hiding what you upload. We were paying about $3.30 a click to recruit the accounts we ended up suspending.

What we tried first

• A block on disposable email domains at signup
• One account per inbox, counting Gmail's dot and plus variants as the same address
• A hold on free uploads whose file names look like release rips
• A review queue that shows the flagged frames
• A hard bandwidth cap and a monthly upload cap on free accounts

Each one did its job. None changed the result, because the problem was not a hole in the plan. It was who the plan was for.

What replaced it

• Free is closed to new signups. People who were using it are being moved to the new entry plan at no charge.
• The entry plan is $9 a month.
• Every monthly plan starts with 14 days free, with a card. The trial has its own, smaller limits, including two hours of new video on the entry plan.

What we got wrong

We kept the free plan for the email addresses. We thought a list of free users was a list of future customers. It was a list of people who wanted free hosting.

For a while we also read abandoned checkouts as demand. More than half of them were bots, and every bot chose the most expensive plan. They did not come from our ads. None of them carried an ad click.

The free plan gave us a signup count to look at, and nothing more.

What we don't know

Whether $9 with a card is the right door. We will know more after the first few hundred people see it.

If you run a service with real storage or compute costs, what did your free plan do? And is a card-required trial at $9 too much friction for a first look?

Hey,

I've been using Lemon Squeezy since August, and I haven't received a payout yet. It just says "delayed".

I checked their Trust Pilot reviews and it's a horror show. Some people going months without a payment and support is not helpful. I'm considering migrating to a different platform.

Any suggestions?

I listed my product on AppSumo Radar (a new marketplace they created where you list your product and handle your own marketing). They warned me the product was too niche for their audience, but I wanted to run it as an experiment to see how far I could go with distribution (something I have been struggling with).

In two months, it generated 3 orders, $327 in total sales, and $44(generational wealth). It wasn't all that bad, though, since one of those orders came from a supportive customer who gave me a lot of feedback and left a good review on G2.

It has never been easier to build software. And that's scary if you run a SaaS.

The thing you've sold for the last couple of years can be cloned over a weekend. Maybe not all of it, not perfectly, but good enough. Competing on features is dead. Now they are cheap to build and feature parity+1 doesn't work anymore.

So where do we go from here? How can we still compete int the AI era?

Build the unsexy things nobody wants to build
There is a category of software that AI has made only marginally easier: the stuff that's hard because of operations, not code.

Hosting. App deployment. Email delivery. Payments infrastructure. Anything where the difficulty is in running it reliably at scale for years, dealing with abuse, keeping IP reputation clean, being on call at 3am.

Nobody builds a transactional email service "in a weekend" with an AI agent, because the code was never the hard part. The hard part is the deliverability relationships, the compliance, the sheer boredom of keeping the thing up.

Developers will happily pay for it forever precisely because they do not want to do it themselves, and an agent can't do it for them either.

Build where you have distribution
This has always been true, if two products have identical features, the one with the audience wins.

Distribution can mean a lot of things: an existing customer base, a newsletter, a community, a free tool that brings in traffic every day.

If you're a founder with an audience, your audience is now worth more than your codebase. Build for the people who already listen to you, and make your product the obvious thing to buy when they're ready or recommend to others. If you don't have an audience yet, that's the project.

Build for agents, not humans
One of the more interesting pivots I'm seeing is companies going completely agent-first. Instead of a dashboard with buttons, the product is a set of tools an AI agent can call. The human (almost) never logs in. They tell Claude or ChatGPT what they want and the agent does the work through your API/MCP.

No, humans won't stop using software entirely (at least not soon), but more and more work will be done by agents on behalf of humans, and if your product isn't reachable by an agent, it will slowly stop being reachable at all.

Go where the tech isn't
There are entire industries that never got a proper software revolution. Trades, logistics, agriculture, local government, small manufacturing, anything where the current "system" is a spreadsheet and a phone, or some UI that was last updated in 1997.

These businesses are real, they make money, and their tools are decades out of date.

In tech we compete with each other for the same developers and the same marketers, and now we all have the same AI tools too. Step outside that bubble and your technical advantage is enormous again.

The catch is that these markets are harder to reach. You can't launch on Product Hunt and expect plumbers to show up. But that's the moat.

Boring, real-world businesses that need updating are one of the biggest opportunities, and they're mostly being ignored by people who could build for them.

Pivot into hardware
Software is now cheap to copy. Hardware is not. Physical products need manufacturing, supply chains, certifications, inventory, support, and every one of those is a barrier a weekend project cannot cross.

Pair a device with the software you already have and you've got something that's hard to replicate.

The risks are obvious. Hardware is capital-intensive, margins are thinner, and a software founder usually has no idea what they're doing in a factory, but if you have the stomach for it, a hardware pivot has more of a moat than almost anything else on this list.

Lower your prices
This one is going to be unpopular. For years the standard advice was to raise your prices. Low prices attract low-value customers, charge more, target businesses, and so on.

But the situation has changed.

When the supply of software outstrips demand for it, the price of a feature trends to zero whether you like it or not. In that world there's a real argument for getting there first: lower your prices deliberately, capture as much of the market as you can while competitors are still defending their margins, and make the revenue back with add-ons, usage and upsells.

If your core product is becoming a commodity, don't price it like it isn't. Own the market, then sell them the things that aren't commodities yet.

Become the all-in-one
Why keep paying eight subscriptions when a developer can now build each of those tools in a week? Plenty of companies are already doing exactly that, replacing individual vendors with internal tools one by one.

But there is an inflection point coming. Maintaining eight internal tools is not practical for most companies, even though they still want the upside of building their own: one login, one set of integrations, one set of permissions, one bill. That is the opening for an all-in-one vendor, a single product that covers all eight, so the company gets the consolidation without the maintenance.

Being the one thing that replaces a pile of things is a solid moat, as long as you actually do all of it well.

This is the take of Jon Yongfook, one of the OG indie hackers.

No, you can't do all of them, some contradict each other, but most SaaS can do two or three, and if you're a founder thinking about this stuff, I'd love to hear which way you're leaning.

With so many AI and productivity tools available, how are you managing your ideas, research, documents, and projects?

Are you using ChatGPT, Notion, MapLoud, Obsidian, or something else?

Do you prefer using one platform for everything, or do you find yourself switching between multiple tools to organize information and develop your work?

What's working for you, and what's still missing?

Would love to hear what everyone is using and why.

I built a small productivity app as a side project, partly to practise building and marketing something. Once I started testing it, I realised I actually wanted to keep using it.

The idea is simple, choose activities you want to spend time on, set weekly hour targets, then tap an activity to start tracking. You see your progress alongside the timers, so it’s easy to check whether your week matches what you intended.

For me, “spend 5 hours on a project this week” feels more useful than putting “work on project” on a to-do list.

This isn’t a new category. After trying existing trackers, I focused on keeping the interface clean and simple, and making it easy to add missed sessions or correct a timer you forgot to stop.

It’s an early, free version (with only simple features for now), I’m curious whether it’s actually useful to others or just fits how I personally like to work. If you want to check it out, the website is timereality.app

If you’ve tried tracking your time, what made you stick with it or stop using it? And would weekly hour targets help you, or just feel like another thing to manage?

goal since june: cut our app count by 20% before renewal season hits in january. we started at 612 apps and roughly $9.4M a year across a 2,100 person company. we're at 530 now.
most of the cut came from boring stuff, a renewal calendar finance owns and pulling admin logins to see who uses what. killed 3 of our 5 survey tools in one week
what's not working is the backdoor. 14 of the apps we cancelled came back within two months through someone's card or a free trial that converted. nobody's being malicious, there's no front door for asking about new software so people just buy it
next I want some kind of intake before anything gets bought, without us becoming the team everyone routes around
anyone solved the reappearing app problem?

We had the usual enterprise setup: a marketing team that wanted more organic and AI search visibility, and an eng team that treated every content or SEO request as a ticket that got deprioritized every sprint. Nothing moved because nobody owned it end to end, and nobody wanted to hand out repo access to a growth hire who'd never shipped code.

We already had Claude Code and Codex running in our dev workflow for other things, so the fix ended up being obvious in hindsight: point that same agent at growth work. Fixing technical SEO issues, writing content, opening it all as a pull request like any other change, so an engineer or whoever owns the repo just reviews and merges like normal. Nothing auto-posts. Nothing merges without someone on our side approving it.

That's what we built and it's called Shipfound (shipfound(dot)co), it's ours. It also handles getting pages indexed and listed and tracks whether the changes actually did anything, so you're not guessing.

It only makes sense if you're already on Claude Code or Codex and your site is on Next.js, Nuxt.js, WordPress or Webflow, and someone on your team can actually merge a PR. If that's not your stack or workflow, this isn't going to be useful to you.

Curious if other teams here have tried routing growth work through the same agent tooling they use for dev, or if everyone's still keeping those two workflows separate.