Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?
"We have stories today of a lot of people replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SaaS with Replit. I think the vertical SaaS is in trouble." https://x.com/plzaccelerate/status/1946389738803335645
Does the HN community have examples of this that doesn't come from someone selling AI tooling? I'm asking as someone who makes and sells a vertical SaaS, and we’ve seen no evidence of it yet. So far, we’ve been able to reduce accounting, legal and consultant spending significantly, but our horizontal SaaS spending is going up due to lots of cool AI subscriptions (Claude Code etc.)
Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.
I've seen it used in two ways to talk about software...
1.
- Horizontal = broad
- vertical = niche
2.
- horizontal = notion solving a specific problem and solving others via integration with other products
- vertical = a company like microsoft that solves a range of problems through directly integrated 1st party products.
Sounds like the CEO/Marketing team at Replit are on a roll. There's so much AI hype right now it's frightening.
We replaced a resume parsing SaaS with AI. They have some additional features that might make it worth using for others but an LLM prompt gave us good enough results and was 10X+ cheaper. Had been spending thousands of dollars a year.
I think a lot of CRMs can be replaced by AI.
Most of them are garbage, overly complex or clunky, and all you really need are workflows that map to your specific needs.