Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?
"We have stories today of a lot of people replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SaaS with Replit. I think the vertical SaaS is in trouble." https://x.com/plzaccelerate/status/1946389738803335645
Does the HN community have examples of this that doesn't come from someone selling AI tooling? I'm asking as someone who makes and sells a vertical SaaS, and we’ve seen no evidence of it yet. So far, we’ve been able to reduce accounting, legal and consultant spending significantly, but our horizontal SaaS spending is going up due to lots of cool AI subscriptions (Claude Code etc.)
We have been building tons of internal apps with AI - some just cool widgets vs serious vertical apps.
Cool useful widget - A simple multi city clock homepage which is totally offline https://x.com/jharohit/status/1945756661706330574
vs.
A full blown NDA tracker which uses uploaded signed NDAs to process using gemini 2.5flash, metadata stored in Firebase and then a lightweight table to list all (incl when some are expiring in next 6 months) and what are key items to keep an eye out for, key details (name, company, country, counterparty, etc). NextJS deployed app on standard VM on office server (no replit tho). Will open source this shortly.
We replaced a resume parsing SaaS with AI. They have some additional features that might make it worth using for others but an LLM prompt gave us good enough results and was 10X+ cheaper. Had been spending thousands of dollars a year.
Not yet and won't be 100% but I am working on an AI agent to build a custom support workflow and replace at least half of Level 1 support team with that. The reason is not just cost but efficiency.
Sounds like the CEO/Marketing team at Replit are on a roll. There's so much AI hype right now it's frightening.
I think a lot of CRMs can be replaced by AI.
Most of them are garbage, overly complex or clunky, and all you really need are workflows that map to your specific needs.
Similar with CMS. They're bloated because they try to do everything for everyone.
this. plus most CRMs have a huge attack vector for info leak.
Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.
Vertical is deep, specialized. Horizontal is broad, workflows, teams.
MS teams is horizontal. Send files, real time chat, channels based around access. Integral with general tools like Office and thus you're paying for more.
Slack is more vertical. It plugs well into integrations, people can write their own alerts. Discord is for games and gaming communities.
Full vertical - I helped to sell one for Asian hospitals. Hospitals were building their own comm system because Slack didn't have the fine grained access for patient data. Also Asians took stickers seriously. You can't just give a doctor a thumbs up frog emoji on their message to acknowledge. It had to take significant message space.
Your own definition seems to contradict itself. Slack is horizontal, like Teams, send files, real time chat, video huddles, channels based on access, integral with other tools via plugins.
Not every tool is going to be HIPAA compliant, or the equivalent in other countries.
Yes, a vertical saas will have many of the same features. If they didn't have the feature, people would just buy the horizontal.
Slack does not come bundled with a spreadsheet and word processor though. MS Teams does - that's your horizontal. People who buy Slack generally don't buy Word.
It's a common strategy for a startup to go vertical, then horizontal. Slack was in the business of replacing IRC at first (hence the # logo), but kept going deeper.
HIPAA compliance is another vertical. It's not worth it for Slack to go after hospitals; it's a customer channel they don't understand or sell to. The apps that do hospital won't go after Slack's customers either. But both will go after the ones using MS Teams, email, or WhatsApp.
Another example is payment gateways. Stripe covers 46 countries. Yet nearly every country and region has their own localized payment gateway. Because Stripe doesn't have the depth to cover all the channels, every bank, every e-wallet. E-wallets are lighter than bank accounts, making them some of the most tightly regulated, especially for money laundering and countries with more crime/corruption. Stripe won't do these; most people with e-wallets have bank accounts and credit cards. It's a lot of work just to deal with one country, too much to cover 46 countries.
The way I read it:
Vertical: industry specific (functionality that can only be used in one or a few industries). The ultimate case of this would be a completely custom solution a bank uses to do x, with a custom integration to their databases etc.
Horizontal: Can be used by many industries as they all need it (accounting software, communication & marketing etc.) Office 365 or Slack are classic examples.
I've seen it used in two ways to talk about software...
1.
- Horizontal = broad
- vertical = niche
2.
- horizontal = notion solving a specific problem and solving others via integration with other products
- vertical = a company like microsoft that solves a range of problems through directly integrated 1st party products.
anybody got a nice CRM replacement using AI?