SaaS isn't dying, the front door is changing

Everyone keeps saying SaaS is dead. Every tech cycle has this. 3D TVs were going to kill flat screens. Crypto was going to replace banks. The metaverse was going to replace reality. None of that happened. The existing tools kept working. The hype moved on.

Now it's AI's turn. SaaS is dead, everything will be an agent, nobody needs apps anymore. Nobody needs developers, everyone will build everything in-house.

I don't buy it.

I built Edicek. Started with a web app. Then I built a native iOS app. Then a Mac app that's still in private testing. The web app was first, and it gets used the least. Not because it's bad. Because I reach for the native apps instead.

A few weeks ago I was doing research inside the Edicek monorepo and needed data I had saved in the production app. Not in the codebase, not in a local file. In Edicek itself. I sat there thinking how to get it out. The answer was a simple CLI tool. I pulled my saved cards locally and processed them inside Claude Code.

Edicek didn't lose value in that moment. I still needed everything it stores and organizes. I just accessed it through a different door. Not the web app. Not the iOS app. A terminal command inside my code editor.

That's what's actually happening with SaaS. The service underneath isn't going anywhere. People still need to save things, organize, find, remember. That need doesn't change. What changes is how you get to it. Today it's a web app. Tomorrow it might be an MCP server plugged into Claude. Or a CLI. Or something that doesn't exist yet.

I can already see this with Edicek. The knowledge base could live as an MCP server. You'd ask Claude a question and it would pull from your saved cards without you ever opening Edicek. The UI would still exist for browsing, configuring, looking around. But it wouldn't be the only way in.

And this isn't even touching the stuff nobody wants to deal with. SLAs, guaranteed uptime, support, regular updates, infrastructure maintenance, scaling, designing new features. SaaS isn't just a UI you can clone over a weekend. It's an ongoing commitment to keeping something running and getting better. Good luck replicating that in-house with a prompt.

Every few years someone declares the current way of doing things dead. It's just external pressure from people trying to steer the market their way. The tools that solve real problems don't disappear. They just get a new front door.