I saw headline lately claiming “the era of pure SaaS is dead”, often pointing to valuation drops in public companies like Monday, Wix, and HubSpot.
I think that framing is wrong.
SaaS isn’t dead.
Undisciplined SaaS is.
For years, companies were rewarded for:
- Shipping more features
- Growing headcount and cost ahead of revenue
- Optimizing for narratives instead of margins
- Treating cloud spend as a future problem
That worked in a world of cheap capital.
That world changed.
What’s being re-rated now isn’t software — it’s operating models.
In most companies I see, the real issues aren’t:
- Talent
- Tools
- Product ideas
They’re:
- Over-engineered systems
- Architecture disconnected from business reality
- Infrastructure costs with no clear owner
- Teams optimized for speed, not sustainability
AI accelerates this shift, it doesn’t cause it.
When features become easy to generate, execution discipline becomes the moat.
The companies that will quietly win from here are the boring ones:
- Fewer moving parts
- Clear ownership
- Intentional cost
- Technology that earns its keep
If your platform is live and things feel heavier, slower, or more expensive than they should — that’s usually fixable without a rebuild.
Most of the work is subtraction.