Zan Digital › Topics
SaaSpocalypse
What agents do to seat-priced software, vendor by vendor.
- 00135% of Point SaaS Gets Absorbed by Agents. Start the ClockRoughly 35% of point-product SaaS is projected to be absorbed into agent ecosystems by 2030. Which categories are structurally exposed, and which are not.~35%
- 002Agent Marketplaces: What Distribution Is Actually WorthEvery major platform launched an agent marketplace. In one editor's data, 3 agents took 92% of turns. What marketplace distribution is really worth.92%
- 003AI Moats in 2026: Integration Depth Beats Model DepthThe top 4 AI labs sit within 25 Elo points of each other. Model quality no longer separates products. Integration depth does, and here is the evidence.25 Elo
- 004Build vs Buy Just Flipped. The Procurement Case BrokeFounders are replacing tool categories with internal builds because agents made building cheap. The full cost comparison, and what the build case omits.~35%
- 005Data Moats Are Overrated. Workflow Moats Are NotMost proprietary data can be bought or approximated. Palantir grew US commercial revenue 149% in Q2 2026 by owning the workflow, not the data corpus.149%
- 006Harvey vs Thomson Reuters: The First Real Incumbent TestHarvey reached an $11B valuation on roughly $190M ARR selling against legal research incumbents. Whether the displacement is real, or additive, on the numbers.$11B
- 007Horizontal SaaS in 2026: Five Tests Before You StartGoogle folded a $20 per user AI add-on into a $2 price rise. Five tests that decide whether a horizontal SaaS company is still worth starting in 2026.$20
- 008Incumbent Advantage: Why Worse Enterprise AI Keeps WinningGiven a free choice, just 8% of workers pick Copilot. Given only Copilot, 68% adopt it. Here is the incumbent advantage machine, and how challengers break it.8%
- 009MCP: The Standards Fight That Decides the Agent StackMCP went from one company's experiment to a Linux Foundation standard with 97M monthly SDK downloads. What it settles, what it does not, and who benefits.~97M
- 010Micro SaaS Economics: What One Person Can Actually RunClosed micro SaaS deals change hands at a 3.9x median profit multiple. What AI made cheaper, what it did not, and where the one-person software business stops.3.9x
- 011Point Solutions: 3 Escape Routes From the SqueezeBuyers promised consolidation. In 2026 the average SaaS portfolio shrank 0.07% while multiples fell to 3.3x revenue. Three escape routes for point solutions.0.07%
- 012SaaS Categories AI Is Erasing, and 5 Getting StrongerWe scored 15 SaaS categories on origination, write authority, liability and substitutable work. 10 are being erased, 5 get stronger, and here is why.-57%
- 013Salesforce in the Agent Era: Platform, or Roadkill?Agentforce repriced Salesforce around consumption and autonomous agents. Whether the system of record survives when the interface stops mattering.~$2
- 014Seat Compression: When Success Destroys Your RevenuePer-seat pricing fell to roughly 15% of the SaaS market. If your product reduces headcount, it reduces your revenue. The trap, and the four ways out.~15%
- 015Services-as-Software: Selling Outcomes, Not LicencesAI lets vendors deliver what used to be consulting hours as a productised service. How the margins, sales motion and liability all change, with worked pricing.~$190M
- 016Software Procurement in 2026: The New CIO Scorecard45% of AI budget now comes out of existing software lines, per Redpoint's survey of 141 CIOs. The new evaluation criteria, and a scorecard you can copy.45%
- 017The 291-App Problem: SaaS Sprawl Meets the Budget AxeThe average enterprise ran 291 SaaS apps in 2025, up from 110 in 2020. A practical rationalisation method, and why most cancellation exercises fail.291
- 018The Agent Orchestration Wars: Zapier, n8n and What WonWorkflow automation is being redefined as agent orchestration, with open source challenging incumbents. How to compare them on reliability, cost and governance.9,400+
- 019Vertical AI Is Eating Horizontal SaaS. The EvidenceVertical AI winners share three patterns: permissioned data, outcome selling and workflow depth. What the playbook is, and where the argument breaks down.~$4.3B
- 020Why 'AI Wrapper' Became the Laziest Insult in SoftwareWrapper is used to dismiss any product built on a foundation model. Distribution, workflow and data rights beat model access. The case for the defence.~$190M
- 021Your Dashboard Is Dead: What Software Looks Like NowIf an agent reads the data and decides, the dashboard becomes an audit surface rather than a workspace. What replaces it, and what the transition gets wrong.~35%