It's so interesting, I find myself on both sides of the AI SaaS Squeeze and I'd love some thoughts. On the one hand we've got a ton of SaaS portfolio companies, and the market has suddenly gotten brutal (see below). On the other, I'm also now an SMB owner with @bkup_climbing. 6 months ago I needed to choose some climbing gym SaaS to run the business. Despite there being ~10 companies making dedicated climbing gym software, they were all terrible. But my plan was to still pick the least bad one because building and maintaining SaaS was hard. But it suddenly become very much not hard. I finally gave up and built dedicated software to run our gym... it took 2 weeks to build everything we needed. A massive scope: membership billing, CRM, marketing automation, check-ins and front desk, digital waivers, events, inventory and point of sale, tap to pay terminal integration, marketing automation, mobile app... all of it, done, working just like i want it, trivial to maintain and improve. With a v1 for our gym, I set a team of agents to the task of turning it into a best-in-class multi-tenant SaaS product for other climbing gyms. Which is now also, amazingly, done. As we onboard beta users, I'm wondering what the right strategy is. i'm overall not very optimistic about the future of the standard issue vertical SaaS business model, so I think a radical reconsideration is warranted. Something like: - give the core SaaS away for free, but charge ~$1-2k/mo for a dedicated AI agent that can use the app for you. - open source it entirely, but charge for customizations and tweaks - some kind of WordPress model where the core software is free but very useful plugins are paid - something I'm not thinking about at all Thoughts? See also, the AI SaaS Squeeze: https://x.com/tylertringas/status/2045180836178252089?s=20