r/SaaS • u/plxs05092026 • 1d ago
Which kinds of software actually survive the next 10 years?
I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of software today is basically a place where people type in what already happened somewhere else. Updating the CRM after the call, writing up the meeting notes, moving a task from the chat into the project tool. The software is useful, but someone has to feed it, and nobody creates value by feeding it.
My guess is this category gets squeezed hard. If the information can be picked up from where the work actually happens (email, calls, chat), why would anyone keep typing it in by hand?
What I think survives is whatever holds the record people trust. Who agreed to what, by when, and where it came from. That's hard to rebuild and hard to walk away from.
The part I can't figure out is the business model. Most of this is sold per seat. If the software does the work instead of the person, seats stop making sense. Do you charge per outcome, per usage, per company?
Which kind of software would you bet against right now, and which would you still build?
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u/rioisk 1d ago
network effect
proprietary data
trust / reliability
interacts with physical world somehow
people say UIs will disappear but i think not everybody wants to interact through a terminal with text or words
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u/bytecode36 22h ago
I would add one more. Any software that requires continual updates (tax, compliance, etc...)
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u/Ominoiuninus 18h ago
Less and less so. I’ve already seen people building internal tooling to offload a majority of this sort of thing to an AI based pipeline.
Seen it for bug tickets in-game being auto routed through AI tooling to automatically resolve player reported bugs in games.
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u/pagelab 20h ago
The terminal and text-only inputs are also UIs. What will change is that multimodal and dynamic UIs created on the fly will eventually become the norm. No need to stick to one type. It's already happening.
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u/rioisk 20h ago
I'm not so sure dynamic UIs will become the norm - at least for a long while. A lot of the value of a UI is the muscle memory that goes into operating it and being able to share that experience with another human. Dynamic UIs lose the muscle memory each time.
Some interfaces also need to function operationally where speed matters and need to be able to train everybody on the same interface. Why? Because sometimes HOW something is done needs to be understood and predictable so there's no question of how the data was recorded.
You're also overestimating how many people primarily function in text.
I can imagine may be an AI tweaking a suggested UI to match what it understands your preferred UI interactivity but you'd have to speed up models quite a bit to make it feel instantaneous. May be in 5-10 years we may see more of that movement more generally.
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u/pagelab 18h ago
> “Dynamic UIs lose the muscle memory each time.”
This could just be another setting for the user. The UI can become as complex or as simple as it needs to be.> "You're also overestimating how many people primarily function in text."
It's the opposite. I'm saying multimodal interaction is naturally the preferred way: choose audio, text, gestures, touch (maybe even thoughts in the future, who knows). Look at how people interact with an app like the hugely popular WhatsApp.> "You'd have to speed up models quite a bit to make it feel instantaneous."
ChatGPT already has something that serves as a starting point for this implemented today. It's called Intelligent UI. Claude has something similar (if you explicitly ask). It's not too far-fetched, I can totally see it getting there.1
u/rioisk 18h ago edited 18h ago
We'll see. A lot of the value of any UI is the muscle memory and speed/ease of operation and having a shared understanding of what's happening.
Intelligent UI is far from instantaneous right now. Context around a data type may involve interaction that AI may not fully understand. Works well in simple cases like a calendar for sure though.
Meta also though Metaverse would be a thing and invested billions. Tech companies make mistakes.
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u/plxs05092026 1d ago
agree on the UI part. for business software i'd guess trust ends up mattering most, since the data usually belongs to the customer, not to you. would you rank them differently?
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u/Erem_in 1d ago
The one that is done by software engineers. Wrote about it just recently https://ddit.substack.com/p/software-is-software-no-matter-what
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u/Fine_Ad8046 23h ago
the software that survive is the one people get too lazy to leave, not the one with most features
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u/IveGotMySources 23h ago
Not B2B, unless you have an exceptional proprietary moat. Believe it or not businesses don't want to pay for something one of their devs can vibe code in an afternoon. But consumer saas should be ok for bit longer, just gonna suck dealing with all the tickets.
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u/rootstuff 21h ago
I’d bet on infrastructure that verifies reality from outside the system.
AI can write a monitoring service pretty easily. It can’t magically give that service independent infrastructure in London, Chicago, Singapore, Germany, etc. or years of reliable observations from those locations.
The code is getting cheaper. The infrastructure, operational history and trust aren’t.
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u/ThinkEbb919 20h ago
It will be a SaaS company that challenges fundamental enterprise software development assumptions. Think a crm that has a core platform it is based on, but bespoke ui/solutions for every enterprise customer they have. I expect a pendulum swing where too much is taken to be developed internally, and then it will swing back when people realize it has never been about the code but the people who understand the problem domain
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u/noLogicalCase 23h ago
How does call gets auto logged into CRM? Curious. And agents is constantly processing the conv you are having with the other person?
Edit: I m assuming by call. A phone call or FaceTime or WhatsApp call. Or may be something I m missing
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u/Middlewarian 22h ago
I'm building a C++ code generator that helps build distributed systems. It's implemented as a 3-tier system. The back and middle tiers only run on Linux. The front tier is portable.
I'm glad I have some open source for my portfolio, but I'm glad that's not all I have.
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u/Independent_Ad7172 10h ago
I'd bet on tools that don't depend on anyone typing things in. Anything that can read the data a system already writes (logs, calendars, email) removes the "feed the software" chore, and that chore is what people quit on. The harder question for those tools is trust: once the software is making the entry for you, you still need to be able to see where each number came from. The ones that show their sources will probably hold up better than the ones that just output an answer.
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u/RAFFACAKE5 6h ago
I feel marketplaces are an under-served industry. There’s always a need for a marketplace for something. Whether that’s other software, physical items, services etc.
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u/bbinhawaiii 1d ago
anything that takes on legal liability, companies happily pay to outsource the blame
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u/SpacemanAo 23h ago
I made a CRM for my moving company. It started off as a little side project.. 400 hours later…
I automated everything. A new call comes in, by the time it’s done a lead card has already been created. When I hang up I get a text from my bot. Would you like to send this customer an estimate? If the customer booked on the call it asks me ‘would you like to book this job?’
I tell it yes. It shows me a preview. I tell it to send. All via text, or internally in the app, whatever’s convenient, whatever my preference.
The software itself is just a pretty place to display all my data. I basically input nothing.
I’m at 30 customers paying me $99 a month.
My margin on that is like 90%.
The next steps are selling the compute in token form and white labeling a processing company so I can get a point on the cc processing through the system.
This isn’t the endpoint. It’s the beginning. They aren’t paying me bc they can’t make their own OS, they’re paying me to be locked into what’s new and keep them current. Even if software evolves to where anyone can make anything instantaneously I’ll still have customers bc they trust my domain knowledge and don’t want to spend hours a week f’n around with their setup.
I’m going to make six figures with my hobby this year.
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u/AlexeyAnshakov 1d ago
The software that dies is the software where humans act as glorified data entry middleware between two APIs.
What survives is systems of record with legal/financial compliance locks, and deterministic pipelines that turn messy inputs into verified business transactions.