The SaaS Disruption is Getting Real

In at least some segments of the market, vibe coding IS replacing SaaS

I’ve been cautiously optimistic on the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative: the idea that companies are about to wholesale replace their enterprise SaaS applications with “vibe coded” alternatives. But it’s becoming clear that this shift is already underway in specific segments of the market, especially at the lower end.

The Information recently published a piece on this exact trend, describing how a number of organizations are using low-code tools such as Claude Code, Lovable, Replit and Cursor to move away from enterprise SaaS platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ServiceNow.

There’s an active discussion in the comments, which I’m part of, and one commenter made a point I fully agree with: it would make complete sense for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to offer a baseline CRM framework. There’s a ton of horizontal functionality in the CRM space that’s already fairly commoditized, not to mention it’s a massive TAM for Anthropic and OpenAI.

The comments also include the usual counterarguments, of course:

Have you factored in the cost of support?

How will you handle maintenance and upgrades?

Are you considering how you’ll servicing hundreds of users?

Those are all fair concerns - but there’s no denying that trend is real, and companies are actively running build-versus-buy calculations - and more than a few are starting to choose “build”. One company saved $100K, another $40K, and even Sanofi (not exactly an SMB) is saving “millions”.

Keep in mind that, even for buyers who ultimately decide not to go down the low-code or no-code path (at least not yet), simply having that option gives them significant leverage in negotiations with their SaaS vendors. That alone is already reshaping the market.

This is textbook Disruptive Innovation. It starts with a lower-end, seemingly inferior solution that incumbents dismiss as “not good enough.”

Until, suddenly, it is.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash