Every few weeks now, someone declares that SaaS is dead. AI writes the software, so why rent it? Build your own. The subscription era is over.
They're half right — which is the most dangerous kind of right.
Here's the true half. If you're a big company with an engineering team, a whole tier of software you've been renting is about to stop making sense. The internal dashboard. The workflow glue. The approval-routing tool with the friendly logo and the $40-a-seat price. When an agent can stand up a version tailored to exactly how you work, in an afternoon, you will not keep paying a vendor for a worse, generic one. That SaaS is genuinely dying, and it should — it was renting you a capability you can now just have.
But "SaaS is dead" and "that SaaS is dead" are very different sentences.
Because building it yourself carries a bill the demo never shows you. Somebody needs the taste to design it well, the time to actually do it, and the patience to keep it alive — to fix it when it breaks at 11pm, hold it consistent as it grows, redesign it when it turns out you were wrong. Most people, most of the time, will not pay that bill. Not because they couldn't. Because they have a life, and it isn't this.
So the value doesn't vanish. It moves.
It moves down the value chain — off "software as a rented capability," which people can now self-serve, and onto the thing the demo never priced: a great, known, consistent solution that just works and keeps working. When the code gets cheap, the code stops being the product. What's left — what people will gladly pay for — is taste, consistency, trust, and the fact that somebody else owns the 11pm.
That's the SaaS I'm actually excited about, and it's the bet behind thistripbtw.us. It takes the scattered little tools a group trip runs on — the shared map, the dropped pins, the running itinerary, the photos, the one link everyone actually opens — and folds them into a single dead-simple thing. No app, no account, no signup; you pay a couple of bucks, and you're the customer instead of the product. Could you rig the same setup out of a maps app, a group chat, and a shared doc? Sure. But you're on a trip. The pitch was never "you can't build this" — it's that this one is genuinely good, it's known, it just works, and it'll still work next month.
SaaS isn't dead. The floor is just rising — the stuff at the bottom is getting absorbed, and the value is climbing toward the things AI won't hand you for free: taste, trust, and somebody who gives a damn about the details.
Rent that. It's worth it.
— Pete