Everyone suddenly wants to tell you SaaS is dead. The Klarna-replaced-Salesforce story spread because it fit the mood, whatever the exact boundary between “replaced the CRM” and “consolidated the data underneath it” turned out to be. Agents are starting to do work that once required people clicking through applications. Seat-based pricing looks vulnerable when the seats themselves stop doing the work. Even Gartner now estimates that as much as $234 billion in enterprise application spending could be exposed to what it calls “agentic arbitrage” by 2030, roughly 20 percent of enterprise SaaS spending. But Gartner itself hedges the apocalypse. It calls what is coming less an apocalypse than a metamorphosis. And I want to make a more specific prediction about what SaaS turns into. Companies will still pay other companies to host important software, secure it, operate it, maintain authoritative data, track regulatory changes, connect to external networks, and answer the phone when something breaks. What is much less obviously going to survive is the assumption that ten thousand different companies should use substantially the same application. The next SaaS company may run one service underneath ten thousand different applications.
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