But we’re not entering a golden age of SaaS. We’re entering an era of personal, disposable software—where engineering shifts from writing code to shaping systems, and engineers are still required for exactly that reason.
On one hand, we are witnessing the true democratisation of software creation. The barrier to entry has effectively collapsed.
Software is becoming a personal utility you generate, rather than a commodity you buy.
A lot of this new software isn't meant to live forever. In fact, it’s the opposite. People are increasingly building tools to solve a single, specific problem exactly once—and then discarding them. It is software as a disposable utility, designed for the immediate "now" rather than the distant "later."
The contrast with the traditional SaaS model is stark. SaaS is inherently built to optimize for retention, lock-in, and expansion. It’s a business model designed to keep you inside the ecosystem and growing your footprint. Bespoke tools, on the other hand, optimize for immediacy and control. They don't care about your lifetime value as a customer; they only care about solving the task at hand.
The real cost of software isn’t the initial write; it’s the maintenance, the edge cases, the mounting UX debt, and the complexities of data ownership. These "fast" solutions are brittle.
But there is a flip side. With the barrier to entry gone, the noise level has reached an all-time high.
We’ve entered an era where the ability to generate code is no longer the bottleneck. The real challenge has shifted to distribution and, more importantly, distinguishing the genuine utility from the "get-rich-quick" posturing that has become so prevalent in the industry.
With twenty dollars, a few hours of spare time, and a bit of patience, almost anyone can ship a functional application. We are entering the era of "personal software," where the gap between an initial idea and a working product is narrower than ever before.
While barrier to entry may be gone - judgment, taste, and responsibility are still the job.