Hot Post on Foreign Social Media: “SaaS Is Dead; Agents Shall Rise”

Author: David Ondrej

Translated by TechFlow

TechFlow Intro: Last Monday, Anthropic launched a suite of plugins for Claude Cowork—not a new model, not an upgrade to the chatbot, but plugins. Within 24 hours, the software sector’s market capitalization shrank by $285 billion. A single announcement about a plugin marketplace erased more wealth in one day than most industries generate in an entire year. Wall Street is no longer afraid of AI—it’s afraid of what AI will replace.

David Ondrej points out that what’s dying is a very specific type of software business—one built on a flimsy moat of “pretty UI + integrations + per-seat pricing.” When AI agents can perform work directly within your existing systems, you don’t need 15 different SaaS tools with beautiful dashboards. Value is being sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer—everything in between is being squeezed.

Full text below:

Last Monday, Anthropic launched a suite of plugins for Claude Cowork.

Not a new model. Not a chatbot upgrade. Plugins.

Within 24 hours, the software sector lost $285 billion in market capitalization.

A single plugin marketplace announcement erased more wealth in one day than most industries produce in a full year.

Wall Street is no longer afraid of AI.

It’s afraid of what AI will replace.

II

Here’s where most people misunderstand.

They hear “SaaS is dead” and assume companies will stop buying software.

That’s not what’s happening—not at all.

What’s dying is a very specific type of software business—if you understand exactly which kind, you’re looking at the biggest startup opportunity in a decade.

Let me explain:

III

For the past 15 years, the SaaS playbook has been simple:

Find a common business workflow. Build a beautiful UI around it. Add some integrations. Charge per seat, per month. Defend your position through switching costs and minor product tweaks.

This playbook created hundreds of billionaires.

But it has a fatal flaw—no one talks about it.

Most value was never in the software itself. It resided in how the software organized workflows.

The UI was a middleman.

And AI has just made that middleman obsolete.

IV

Here’s what Anthropic actually did—because the headlines missed the point.

They didn’t build a better chatbot. They turned Claude into a work-execution layer.

Cowork plugins let AI agents log into your existing tools—your CRM, your documents, your database—and autonomously execute entire workflows: legal audits, sales pipeline management, data analysis, production-grade code, and more.

No human involvement required. That’s the part that spooked the market.

Because if AI agents can do the work directly inside your existing systems—why do you need 15 different SaaS tools with beautiful dashboards?

Here’s the part that should keep SaaS founders awake at night:

If 10 AI agents can do the work of 100 employees, you no longer need 100 Salesforce seats.

AI doesn’t kill software directly. It kills the number of employees using that software. That kills the per-seat revenue model. That kills the business.

V

This is what I call the “Thin Middle Squeeze.”

Imagine three layers:

Top layer—AI agents. The things that actually do the work.

Middle layer—SaaS UIs. Dashboards, workflows, buttons you click.

Bottom layer—Systems of record. Databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store real data.

Now, value is being sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer.

Everything in the thin middle layer is getting crushed.

That’s why Adobe’s forward P/E ratio dropped from 30 to 12, and ServiceNow’s fell from 67 to 28—not because people no longer need what they do, but because investors realized that when AI agents can bypass the UI entirely, the moat around “pretty UI + integrations” is paper-thin.

Interfaces used to be the product—but now they’re just a shell.

VI

But this is exactly where those shouting “SaaS is dead” are completely wrong.

SaaS isn’t dead—the easy SaaS moat is dead.

That’s a massive difference.

Companies will spend more on software this year than ever before. Enterprise AI capital expenditures alone will exceed $470 billion by 2026. This isn’t a shrinking market—it’s an explosively expanding one.

The money hasn’t disappeared—it’s moving.

Most people are too busy panicking to see where it’s landing.

VII

Here’s where the money is actually going:

• AI platform subscriptions

Usage-based. Consumption-based. Not per-seat. Companies will pay for AI capacity the way they pay for cloud computing—based on what they use, not how many people sit in their buildings. This is already happening. GitHub’s AI agents are gated behind premium tiers with usage-based pricing. That’s the template.

• Systems of record

Agents don’t eliminate backends—they operate them. CRMs, ERPs, data warehouses—these become more valuable, not less. Because AI agents need clean, authoritative, trustworthy data to act. Garbage in, garbage out—only worse, at scale. Companies with large-scale, well-governed data will win.

• Security, governance, and compliance

When agents act at scale, errors happen at scale. Every company deploying AI agents will pay for permissions, audit logs, policy enforcement, monitoring, and evaluation. This is boring infrastructure—it will quietly mint money for the next decade.

• Outcome-based pricing

Instead of “$99/month per seat,” you’ll see “$5 per reviewed contract,” “$2 per resolved support ticket,” “$10 per enriched qualified lead.” Software will be priced like labor—because it’s replacing labor. This is where the entire industry’s pricing model shifts.

• Services

This one surprises people. But when building software becomes cheap and easy, companies will experiment with far more custom software services. Implementation, workflow design, migration, integration work—the demand for services is about to explode. Vibe coding makes creation easy. Making it work in real businesses is an entirely different story.

VIII

So if you’re building a startup right now—or thinking about it—this is the only question that matters:

Where in the stack are you building?

If you’re building in the thin middle layer—building beautiful UIs on top of others’ data, charging per seat, with no proprietary advantage—you have a serious problem. Not because your product is bad—but because the economics of your position are collapsing in real time.

The agent layer above you is eating your interface.

The system-of-record layer below you is eating your lock-in.

You’re being squeezed from both sides—and this squeeze will only accelerate from here.

IX

Here’s what you should build instead.

Build in the agent layer. Create AI-native tools that don’t just display information—they execute workflows. Don’t show users dashboards. Do the work for them. Price by outcome, not by seat. Become the thing that acts.

Build in the data layer. Own proprietary data. Build systems of record for domains that still lack good ones. Make yourself the authoritative backend every AI agent needs to plug into. Agents come and go—the data layer is eternal.

Build infrastructure. Security. Monitoring. Evaluation. Governance. Compliance. Tools that enable safe, large-scale deployment of AI agents. Not sexy. Extremely profitable. Demand hasn’t even begun yet.

Build services. Help companies implement, customize, and operate AI systems in their real businesses. That’s where most of the real-world complexity lives—and where massive value will be created over the next five years.

X

Here’s the irony no one’s talking about.

Anthropic’s Cowork—the product supposedly killing SaaS—is itself a SaaS product, sold via subscription over the internet to organizations.

SaaS as a delivery model works well—and always has.

But SaaS as a business strategy built on shallow moats and commoditized workflows priced per seat—that’s over.

Conclusion

Everyone looks at that $285 billion loss and sees destruction.

I see displacement.

That value hasn’t vanished. It’s moving—from companies capturing value by acting as middlemen between humans and their tools, to companies capturing value through execution, data, and infrastructure.

The old playbook: build workflow UIs, charge per seat, grow revenue by increasing your customers’ headcount.

The new playbook: build things that own data, deliver outcomes, or protect systems. Price based on delivered value—not on butts in seats.

If you’re a founder reading this, the worst thing you can do is panic.

The second-worst thing is to keep building like it’s 2019.

The best thing you can do is understand where value is moving—and stand where it lands.

The SaaS era isn’t over.

The easy-SaaS era is.

Honestly, for anyone truly building real things, this is the best news in a decade.