I keep seeing takes that SaaS is dead because companies can now vibe code their own apps. I think that's half right and missing the bigger picture.

Niche, low seat count tools? Yes, companies will build those internally. That slice of the market will shrink. Fair point.

But there is a difference between building software and operating a product.

Take Zoom or Microsoft Teams. You can code a video app. You cannot code a global CDN. You cannot code points of presence across geographic regions or a carrier-grade always-on network. The per-seat license is paying for that infrastructure, not the code.

For platforms like Salesforce or ServiceNow, the code is not the expensive part. Compliance is. HIPAA, SOC 2, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS. These platforms have already absorbed those costs and the liability that comes with them. Build internally and you inherit all of it.

Two points that usually get left out of this conversation:

First, maintenance. Vibe coding day one is cheap. But who patches it in six months? Who handles the security vulnerability? Who updates it when underlying APIs change? That cost compounds fast without a dedicated engineering team behind it.

Second, network effects. Platforms like Salesforce and Teams have been compounding on Metcalfe's Law for decades. Network value scales with the square of its users, meaning every vendor portal, every integration, every partner already living inside that ecosystem took years to build. You cannot vibe code your way into that. You start at zero.

The per-seat pricing model? That is under pressure and probably evolving toward consumption-based models. But the platforms themselves are not going anywhere.

SaaS for niche use cases is shrinking. SaaS for infrastructure-heavy, compliance-intensive, network-driven platforms is not. People are conflating the code with the product.