Comment by pizzafeelsright 3 days ago
The moat for SaaS is gone.
I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations.
I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage.
I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.
My friends are circulating our own Grok videos (6-10 seconds) of memes and parodies.
We are re-making entire scenes from movies with our desired dialog and endings.
We're going to collapse society with this style of thinking, particularly since it can now escape out into the realm of non-technical folks.
Death of true understanding because everyone feels entitled to paying the lowest perceived monetary cost possible for everything in their lives.
Society in large part, and civilization for the most part, collapsed generations ago.
The mental torque of a teenager today is so weak that they cannot answer four WHY? questions in a row without a panic attack.
This depends on what kind of SaaS
I guarantee you that the "moat" is very much intact for the SaaS we are building (more developer / gaming tool but then again so is this) because it requires specialized skills, synthesis and most importantly AI would have no idea how to build it without very specific prompting from our architect
CRUD wrappers never had a moat. Even the most basic viable SaaS that wasnt a micro SaaS had some secret sauce or differentiation. And AI doesnt help you get that unless you already know what it is.
Not to mention network effects. Users are a moat and if you can sell and grow fast enough and create a community, no amount of "there's a clone" can beat it. Never underestimate the power of brand recognition.
the moat is always going to exist between the haves and have nots. AI just raises the bar for the standard of quality. you are not going to vibe code a new OS in a weekend - or else everyone else and their mamas could, too, in which case, you wouldn't be special
This is not true. And it's easy to disprove.
Most SaaS pre-AI had an open source alternative. Most people didn't use them not because the open source alternative lack some features, it was because mainteinance was hard. It's way easier to pay a small monthly fee and forget about it.
Perhaps you could, but you probably always could've built a clone of any SaaS app you wanted, it's just become faster.
I'm reminded of the infamous Dropbox Hacker News comment[1]. If you're looking at stuff like this thinking "what's the point? I could just make that myself" then you're not the target audience in the same sort of way Ikea isn't trying to sell stuff to carpenters.
This is true even when the barrier to entry in making these sorts of systems has gotten way lower.
But in this case it’s become so much faster and cheaper as to represent a serious disruption
Cloned in less than 24 hours. [0]
For every dropbox that managed to build a business out of a feature, there are probably >1000 that didn't. But I guess this meme is a good way to kill off bad businesspeople.
> The moat for SaaS is gone.
What does this even mean?
I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.
All the hard work is always chasing down edge cases, scaling, operational issues and other things that don't show up the user-exposed features. And talking about features, the innovation in coming up with them, or iterating on making them work with real customer experience is a ton of value, even if copying the ideas that work later is much easier - which is why I generally prefer betting on an innovator with just of enough traction to show they can stick with it. The best category leaders both innovate and steal/copy/buy all the innovation they aren't producing in house to maintain their lead.
and a lot of those features only really matter if you are serving a lot of customers. PHP is just fine if your serving 10-20 internal customers.
It's a bit vague, but the idea is right. If your SaaS is built with AI, then any customer you have can also build it with AI, and whatever they build is going to be better suited to their needs and will run cheaper because they aren't paying your margin. AI skews the build vs buy curve massively, because it makes building so much easier
This completely ignores that a lot of products distill expertise into something manageable for the end user.
And that the actual act of these 3rd parties offering said products maintains not only the software, but the knowledge required to build it.
You don't tell agents to build this stuff from the ground up. Someone builds an open source tool, and you get your agents to deploy and customize it. The plumbing and groundwork is already laid, you're just detailing.
I thought cloudflares email product is only for receiving, not outbound ?
I was writing this comment and then asked AI model to find me a blog post and it looks like Cloudflare does support outbound now (I am seeing a send mail option) https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/ So yes it supports both and this feature was recently added (september 2025) & its still in private beta or something similar but yes now its possible.
But I have still written parts of the comments where I had assumed that you were right and I am still gonna let it be to show what my thinking process was I guess. Not that it matters now but I am frugal in finding alternatives sooo yeah :> lol (currently the cf private beta option's the best imo)
Yea I am a little bit confused as well being honest.
That being said, I feel as if even if Cloudflare might not be the best approach, one can try out purelymail (https://purelymail.com/) as well.
I feel as if Amazon SES might be the best option for it (or any EU alternative, I remember seeing an UK service with the same competitive pricing of Amazon SES)
But that being said, I am unable to understand the exact use of E-mail & what's the real idea to suggest the best infrastructure to use.
I mean technically, can something like cloudflare workers for inbox and amazon ses for outbound work if cloudflare email product is only for receving
That being said all of this is basing on the fact that what you thought is right
Cloudflare/SES works if you want raw email sending and receiving. If you want threading, parsing, storage, retrieval, logic, filtering, labeling, search -- you'll need to build it out yourself.
We're devs ourselves so ik the first thought is usually "how hard can it be?" in our validation, we thought it was hard enough to build a startup around :) these things are easier said than done, and no one in 2026 should be stitching together email workflows. especially not agents
honestly, I have been thinking about it. But I feel like it would be a fun little side project if people actually try it out. (maybe you mention that you can build it)
So let's see how many people actually build it. Let's make it the new browser test instead and launch many open source solutions instead and see what's the best perhaps.
It would be a really great experiment imo.
The moat around TV shows feels gone with TikTok/YT.
I am 99% certain I could reach parity in a weekend by publishing content on public networks, without the old distribution or pricing constraints.
I think it would all run on infrastructure that is effectively free to use.
I am not certain I have the bandwidth to handle distribution, sustained attention, and moderation once the content starts flowing.