BuildVsBuy
Build vs. Buy, Rewritten: Is SaaS Actually Dying?
Updated July 3, 2026.
For twenty years, “build vs. buy” had a boring answer: buy. Why sink engineers into a CRM or a project tracker when someone else already sells a polished one for a few dollars a seat? That logic built the entire software-as-a-service industry. In 2026, it stopped being obvious.
Call it the SaaSpocalypse. In early 2026, roughly 300 billion of market value evaporated once investors did the math on what AI agents actually replace. The thing that made SaaS printing-press profitable, charging per human seat, only works when you need a lot of humans clicking around in the software. Agents don’t click. They just do the task.