I think over the last few months that it can be very easy to see the sheer amount of SaaS AI Pro Max Ultra companies that have emerged for VC funding and have got $5 million in ARR and are scaling to $55 million ARR.
Now it might just be my LinkedIn feed, or the news… But it’s almost starting to become quite comical, I mean if you visit YC’s website and just look at how many SaaS services they have funded in the last 2 years, your mind will be beyond confused.
I mean, half of the companies seem to do the same thing. But the biggest fault, and this is the huge risk that all of them face, is that AI, buying a ChatGPT subscription or Claude or whatever AI you use, can accomplish 99.9% of what these companies are selling. However, the interface is a text box with ChatGPT and with the SaaS service it’s a UI/UX design tailored to solving that problem.
Let me put it to you like this. You want to build a SaaS that “builds mobile apps” and let’s say you want it to take a single user’s prompt and then build all the code and test that code until it can run, on the surface this sounds “simple enough” but under the hood, the SaaS service will most likely have a lot of prompt engineering that goes into making sure the AI builds correctly from the start.
So that it can test and deploy well later. Now you can see what I am talking about with sites like Lovable and Bolt. But… The same thing can be accomplished with ChatGPT, Claude and if you wanted to dive in deeper, Cursor. But here is the one thing I see happening. Overnight a few months ago ChatGPT came out with a meeting recorder and summarising feature in their app, see the issue?
They saw an oversaturated market of meeting AI recorders and came out with a feature that is free and included in your chat subscription, and all of a sudden why are you paying for other services? Better features? Sure, but when ChatGPT is cheaper and I want to almost say, delivers the same quality, why would you go with a competitor?
The same can be true I believe at least with most of the fields around it, unless you are creating your own trained model within a specific field, it seems like the AI tools of the future will belong to the companies that are already creating the technology, OpenAI, Anthropic and so on.
What do you think about the current SaaS market and what they offer over just a ChatGPT subscription for the general population?