SaaS Isn’t Dead — Trust Is Just Hard to Build

By “SaaS dinosaurs,” I mean the big, shiny, pricey software products.

CRMs like Pipedrive.

Project tools like Jira.

Platforms like Monday.com.

You probably heard this line already:

“SaaS is dead.”

It is NOT and I will tell you why.

AI makes software easier to build. That part is true.

Building a “new Jira” is no longer impossible for a small team. It is still a little challenging, but doable.

When I first tried AI-assisted engineering, I expected thousands of low-cost indie tools to flood every SaaS category.

Cheaper CRMs.

Cheaper project management tools.

Cheaper everything.

So why didn’t it happen?

I believe there are 3 main reasons:

1. Cheap is not enough. Trust is what matters.

Copying a successful product and making it cheaper sounds like a good business plan.

But companies don’t want “cheap Jira.”

They want software that will still exist in 3 years.

When researching tools on Product Hunt I noticed many of them dead or abandoned.

That creates a real trust problem for small SaaS products.

For a company, switching costs are often higher that what they will save in a year.

At the same time…

Price signals quality.

Not always fairly, but it does.

A more expensive product often looks more serious. More stable. More powerful.

A cheap product can look like a side project, even when it is actually good.

2. Google and LLMs love the dinosaurs

Quick story from my own experience.

I built a resource planning tool.

At my previous job, we used a similar tool. It was expensive and missing some features I wanted.

I called it ResourcePlanner and bought resourceplanner.io domain.

And at the beginning, it performed great.

Without any huge SEO effort, I was the first non-paid Google result for relevant searches.

The product did what it said. People who found it usually stayed. I was happy.

Then last December, it crashed. Google traffic basically flatlined.

There was Google Search Engine Core update.

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Search is becoming much harder for small tools.

It is not enough to create a few AI-generated blog posts.

It is not enough to comment on Reddit.

It is not enough to have an exact-match domain.

Search engines increasingly reward brands with history, authority, backlinks, mentions, and real demand.

And LLMs work in a similar way.

Ask ChatGPT for the top project management tools.

You will see the old folks names: Jira. Asana. Monday. ClickUp.

Not because they are always the best fit.

But because they have years of mentions, comparisons, reviews, Reddit threads, documentation, integrations, and public data around them.

It is unfair advantage…

3. Big SaaS owns the ecosystem

The product is no longer just the product.

Big SaaS companies have marketplaces, tutorials, implementation partners, templates, communities, certification programs.

You are not just competing with their features.

You are competing with their ecosystem.

That is why “I built a better app” is usually not enough.

Today, you need some form of distribution or community around it.

For example, I am building ResourcePlanner.

But I also built platform managerbay.com for project managers to share knowledge.

I run a Facebook group around remote project management jobs.

And I am trying to identify other places where I can be useful to the management community.

Because one app alone is not enough anymore.

This is where big SaaS companies have another huge advantage.

They are everywhere.

So where is the opportunity?

I still believe a pricing shift is coming.

Big SaaS will move more and more toward enterprise customers.

Atlassian already publicly declared it.

But in order to succeed, I think small SaaS builders need more guerrilla moves.

Less pretending we can outspend enterprise SaaS on advertisement.

More helping each other become visible.

Even between products that are kind of competitors.

Because here is the thing:

We are usually not identical.

One tool is better for agencies.

Another one is better for software houses.

Another one has stronger reporting.

The customer will decide based on their specific needs anyway.

I think it is better approach than believing every indie SaaS founder will beat enterprise SaaS alone with 20 AI-generated blog posts.

Let’s help each other a little…

If you are building something in the management / project management / resource planning space, hit me up.

And if you know someone I should talk to, introduce us pls.

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