What is dying is a very specific type of software business, built on the weak moat of "beautiful UI + integration + per-seat pricing" SaaS.

Author: David Ondrej

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: Last Monday, Anthropic released a set of plugins for Claude Cowork. Not a new model, not an upgrade to a chatbot, but plugins. Within 24 hours, the software stock market lost $285 billion in value. An announcement of a plugin marketplace wiped out more wealth in a single day than most industries produce in a year. Wall Street is no longer afraid of AI; they are afraid of what AI will replace.

David Ondrej points out that what is dying is a very specific type of software business—SaaS built on the weak moat of "beautiful UI + integration + per-seat pricing." When AI agents can complete work directly within existing systems, you no longer need 15 SaaS tools with beautiful dashboards. Value is being sucked up to the agent layer and down to the data layer. Everything in between is being squeezed.

The full text is as follows:

Last Monday, Anthropic released a set of plugins for Claude Cowork.

Not a new model, not an upgrade to a chatbot, but plugins.

Within 24 hours, the software stock market lost $285 billion in value.

An announcement of a plugin marketplace wiped out more wealth in a single day than most industries produce in a year.

Wall Street is no longer afraid of AI.

They are afraid of what AI will replace.

Here is where most people misunderstand this.

They hear "SaaS is dead" and think it means companies will stop buying software.

That's not the case, not at all.

What is dying is a very specific type of software business—if you understand which type, you are looking at the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity in a decade.

Let me explain:

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 slight product adjustments.

This playbook has created hundreds of billionaires.

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

Most of the value is never in the software itself. It’s in the workflows of the software organization.

The UI is the middleman.

And AI has just made the middleman obsolete.

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

They are not building a better chatbot. They turned Claude into a work execution layer.

The Cowork plugins allow AI agents to log into your existing tools—your CRM, your documents, your databases—and autonomously execute entire workflows. Legal audits, sales pipeline management, data analysis, production-grade code, etc.

No human involvement required. That’s the part that has the market in a panic.

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

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

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

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

This is what I call the "Thin Middle Squeeze."

Imagine three layers:

Top Layer—AI agents. The things that actually execute the work.

Middle Layer—SaaS UI. Dashboards, workflows, the buttons you click.

Bottom Layer—Record systems. Databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store real data.

Now, value is being sucked up to the agent layer and down to the data layer.

Everything in the thin middle layer is being crushed.

That’s why Adobe’s forward P/E ratio dropped from 30 to 12. ServiceNow dropped from 67 to 28. Not because people don’t need the things they do—but because investors realize that when AI agents can completely bypass the UI, the moat around "beautiful UI + integration" is as thin as paper.

The interface used to be the product, but now it’s just a shell.

But this is where those saying "SaaS is dead" are completely wrong.

SaaS is not dead; rather, the easy SaaS moat is dead.

That’s a huge difference.

Companies will spend more on software this year than ever before. Enterprise AI capital expenditures alone will exceed $470 billion by 2026. This is not a shrinking market—this is a market exploding in scale.

Money hasn’t disappeared; it’s just moving.

Most people are busy panicking and completely missing where it’s landing.

Here’s where the money is actually flowing:

• AI platform subscriptions

Based on usage. Based on consumption. Not per seat. Companies will pay for AI capacity like they pay for cloud computing—based on what they use, not how many people are sitting in the building. This is already happening. GitHub’s AI agents are gated through premium tiers with usage-based pricing. This is the template.

• Record systems

Agents don’t eliminate the backend; they operate the backend. CRMs, ERPs, data warehouses—these become more valuable, not less important. Because AI agents need clean, authoritative, and trustworthy data to take action. Only garbage in leads to garbage out. Companies with large-scale, well-governed data will win.

• Security, governance, and compliance

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

• Outcome-based pricing

No longer "99 dollars per seat per month," you will see "5 dollars per reviewed contract." "2 dollars per resolved support ticket." "10 dollars per qualified lead." Software will be priced like labor—because it is replacing labor. This is where the entire industry’s pricing model is shifting.

• Services

This is surprising. But as building software becomes cheap and easy, companies will try 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 business is a completely different story.

So if you are building a startup right now—or considering it—this is the only important question:

Where are you positioned in the stack?

If you are building in the thin middle layer—building a beautiful UI on someone else’s data, charging per seat, with no proprietary advantage—you have serious problems. Not because your product is bad. But because the economics of your position are collapsing in real-time.

The agent layer above you is swallowing your interface.

The record systems below you are swallowing your lock-in.

You are being squeezed from both directions. And this squeeze will only accelerate from here.

Here’s what should be built.

Build in the agent layer. Create AI-native tools that do not just display information—they execute workflows. Don’t show users dashboards. Do the work for them. Price based on outcomes, not seats. Be something that takes action.

Build in the data layer. Own proprietary data. Build record systems for domains that don’t yet have good systems. Make yourself the authoritative backend that every AI agent needs to plug into. Agents come and go—the data layer is eternal.

Build infrastructure. Security. Monitoring. Assessment. Governance. Compliance. Create tools for safely deploying AI agents at scale. Not sexy. Extremely profitable. Demand hasn’t even begun.

Build services. Help companies implement, customize, and operate AI systems in their real businesses. This is where most of the real-world complexity lies, and it’s where a lot of value will be created over the next five years.

Here’s the irony that no one talks about.

Anthropic’s Cowork—allegedly the product that kills SaaS—is itself a SaaS product sold to organizations via subscription on the internet.

SaaS as a delivery model is fine; it has always been fine.

And SaaS as a business strategy built on shallow moats and commoditized workflows priced per seat—that is over.

Conclusion

Everyone is looking at this $285 billion loss and seeing destruction.

But I see a shift.

That value hasn’t disappeared. It’s moving—from companies capturing value by being the middleman between humans and their tools, to companies capturing value through execution, data, and infrastructure.

The old playbook was: build workflow UIs, charge per seat, grow revenue by increasing the number of employees at the customer.

The new playbook is: build something that has data, executes outcomes, or protects systems. Price based on the value delivered, not the butts in seats.

If you are 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 the value is moving—and stand where it lands.

The SaaS era is not over.

The easy SaaS era is over.

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

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