Unbundling the SaaS bloat: how vibe coding and AI are killing corporate software prices

A few years ago, if your team needed a small internal tool, say an approval form, a dashboard over a spreadsheet, or a tracker for client requests, you had two choices. Wait months for the engineering team, or buy a SaaS product that did that one thing plus forty others you'd never touch, billed per seat, every month, forever.

There's now a third choice, and it's putting real pressure on what business software can charge.

What "vibe coding" means

The term comes from Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, who used it in February 2025 to describe building software by telling an AI what you want and accepting what it writes, without reading every line. By the end of that year it had become Collins Dictionary's word of the year, defined as writing code "in a somewhat careless fashion with AI assistance".

The "careless" part matters, and we'll come back to it. But the point is this: people who aren't professional developers can now get a working small tool in an afternoon. And professional developers can build in a day what used to take a sprint.

The SaaS bundle was built for a world where building was expensive

Most business software is a bundle. You want a form builder, you get a form builder plus workflows, plus integrations, plus analytics, plus an AI assistant, plus an enterprise tier that unlocks single sign-on. The price reflects the whole bundle, because the vendor's pitch is "you could never build all this yourself".

That pitch was true when writing software was slow and expensive. It's much weaker when the thing you actually need is one form, one table and one email notification, and an AI tool can put that together for you.

The numbers show it's already happening. In its 2026 Build vs. Buy report, Retool surveyed 817 builders and found that 35% had already replaced at least one SaaS tool with something they built, and 78% expected to build more internal tools in 2026. Workflow automations and internal admin tools were the most common targets. (Retool sells a tool for building internal software, so read that with a pinch of salt, but the direction is hard to miss.)

Investors noticed too

In early February 2026, Anthropic released industry plugins for Claude Cowork, an AI assistant that can work with files and handle tasks in areas like sales, finance, legal and marketing. Within days, software stocks had one of their worst sessions in months. CNN reported that a software-industry ETF fell 5.69% in a day, Thomson Reuters had its largest one-day drop on record, and LegalZoom fell almost 20%.

Markets overreact, and many of those stocks recovered. But the fear behind the sell-off was specific: if AI can do the job, why would a company keep paying per seat for software whose main value was doing that job?

What this does to software prices

Big vendors are responding in two ways, and both are good news for buyers.

• Pricing by outcome instead of by seat. When an AI agent does the work, "per user" stops making sense. Salesforce now sells Agentforce per conversation and per action, as well as per user. That's pay-per-use, from the company that made per-seat SaaS the norm.
• Less room to raise prices. Every price increase now gets compared with "could we just build this?". Even when the answer is no, the question makes the negotiation easier for the customer.

The bundle is coming apart. Buyers want to pay for the one thing they use, when they use it, not for a suite.

Should you build it yourself?

Sometimes. A vibe-coded internal tool is great for small, low-stakes jobs: a team dashboard, a one-off data clean-up, a form that feeds a spreadsheet. It's a bad idea for anything that handles payments, personal data or security, unless someone who knows what they're doing reviews it. That "somewhat careless" in the Collins definition is exactly the risk. Someone also has to maintain what you build, and that cost doesn't show up on the first day.

For everything in between, there's a middle path that doesn't involve either building or renting: tools you pay for by use or buy once. You get software someone else maintains, without the monthly bill for features you never open.

Where to start

• List your subscriptions and mark each one: used daily, used sometimes, forgot it existed.
• Cancel the third group today.
• For the second group, look for a pay-per-use or one-time option. That's what our catalog is for, from AI & Chat to Forms & Surveys and Analytics.
• For small, simple internal jobs, it may now be worth trying to build it yourself.

Know a pay-per-use or buy-once tool we should list? Tell us about it.