The SaaSpocalypse: When Software Is Built on Demand

01 / The Sell-off

Investors Saw It First

In early 2026, software stocks sold off hard. People started calling it the SaaSpocalypse.

The fear was simple. AI stopped being a feature inside software and started replacing it.

Three things changed at once.

01

Agents do the work

Agents like Gemini Enterprise and Gemini CLI handle multi-step work like research, tax prep, and coding. Nobody has to click through an interface.

02

Seats shrink

Most SaaS charges per seat. When agents do work people used to do, customers need fewer seats. Revenue per customer falls.

03

Building got cheap

Tools like Google Antigravity make it cheap to build the exact internal tool you need instead of renting a bloated one.

02 / The Inversion

Rented vs. Built on Demand

SaaS was a bet. Building software is expensive, so build it once and rent it to everyone. Every customer pays for the same product and bends their work to fit it.

Coding agents flip that bet. Give an agent a cloud environment and a few API keys, and it builds the pipeline, integration, or tool you need, when you need it, shaped to how you work.

When building is cheap, the shared product loses its main reason to exist. This hits new startups as hard as legacy vendors. Being modern doesn't help if the product can be rebuilt on demand.

SaaS rented software because building it was expensive.
That reason is going away.

03 / B2Me

Software for One

My brother is an indie game developer. For years he paid for an industry-standard creative suite. When the vendor raised his price, he used Google AI Studio to build his own app around his game workflow. Then he canceled.

He's an early adopter. The pattern will spread. Users are becoming builders.

Some of what they build will be disposable: made for one project or one day, then thrown away. Call it B2Me, software made for one person's exact way of working.

That breaks the venture playbook, which bet on sticky, high-margin, recurring revenue from one product sold to many.

04 / Moats

Which Moats Drain

The classic SaaS moats are getting shallow.

01

Features

Competitors can rebuild features in weeks, not years. Margins compress.

02

The interface

When an agent is the user, a familiar UI locks no one in. Moving data between systems gets easy, and switching gets cheap.

03

Premium add-ons

Analytics, forecasting, security triage. Foundation models now cover much of this as table stakes.

05 / What Survives

Become the Pipes

What agents can't generate on demand still holds value: proprietary data, specialized compute, compliance, and trust.

The winners will sell those things through APIs to the agents that consume them. Fewer screens. More infrastructure.

Software stops being the destination.
It becomes the pipes.