I am a big believer in the future of Open Source. I believe a lot
more useful software will be open sourced in near term.
And a lot more non-technical people, especially designers, will
start to contribute more to open source. The biggest change for
the above is the fact that coding agents are now so good and
powerful at bringing ideas to life and will continue improving.
This has two important implications: first, closed-source companies
should reconsider if their strategy of staying closed-source is beneficial
over the long term, because there will very likely be an open-source
competitor that people find more appealing. Second, the long-term
price of many software businesses will be infinitely close to infrastructure
costs such as cloud hosting and data storage.
Let's discuss the first implication. Open-source software has a
huge appealing for many people, especially people with their own
design taste. Being able to control, view, and customize the underlying
code is a significant attraction. Giving customer ownership helps
companies gain early adoption and traction.
For example, take the SaaS product for meeting-booking, which can charge
$10 per month. One can argue that the primary value by the company is their
engineers' ability to assemble lines of code into a functional, beautiful
product. Most value previously comes from this 'assembly process.'
Now, however, the drop in the cost of intelligence fundamentally makes code
assembly much easier.
Soon, the price for customers to use such a product will approach
the raw material and infrastructure cost—e.g. essentially database and
website hosting expenses. There might still be economies of scale
that attract customers to certain SaaS products, but most of today's
SaaS software prices are significantly higher than the component raw materials.
Rationally, instead of subscribing to the product, I can build my own in about 30
minutes using a coding agent. My monthly maintenance cost would likely be
close to $1, compared to $10—or even down to $0 in some cases.
Of course, there may still be value for SaaS companies, especially
where the builders have exceptional taste. This taste and vision
represent one of the main contributions and moats in a world full
of coding agents. Companies with great taste can continue to
innovate and provide additional benefits to users.
However, in the very long term, most products and services will
likely become very cheap. Thus, I believe SaaS—or any product—will
shift toward something resembling political or religious campaigns,
where the ultimate goal is not monetary gain but spreading an
ideology or vision. The best companies themselves become expressions
or manifestos. It's easy to imagine this vision taken to extremes,
where the joy lies simply in allowing more people to use and enjoy
what one has created.