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I think the SaaS apocalypse narrative is mostly panic.
The core miss is this: people keep treating AI models like the final product, when in practice they are the V8 engine in the car, it is critical but companies don't make money selling engines but the most polished, user friendly car. Enterprises pay for workflow reliability, compliance, approvals, integrations, and accountability. That is application layer value capture. That is where margins usually defend.
A real world analogy helps. In autos, the engine is essential, but the profit pool often sits with the brand that owns the full product and customer relationship. Ferrari is the clean example: 2025 revenue was about €7.1B, with EBIT margin around 29.5% and EBITDA margin around 38.8%. Not huge volume, but serious pricing power. The point is not “cars vs software.” Monetization concentrates at the GUI level : experience + brand + ecosystem .
Now back to AI.
If model access alone was the endgame, frontier labs would just sell API and stop there. They are not doing that. Anthropic bundles Claude Code into paid plans across Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. They also keep adding product surface area like Artifacts and explicit frontend design workflows like Claude design => they are moving up-stack into SaaS style recurring revenue because that layer has more money.
Same pattern to SaaS : Subscription seats, admin controls, SSO, security, connectors, memory, governance, team collaboration. This is not accidental they now this. they know LLM is just a commodity
Could model providers force lock in through aggressive integration and forcing their tools on us? Maybe for a while. But in Europe for example, antitrust action will come pretty quickly if they start putitng their models only via their tools. I don't think that moat is very solid
My test for this thesis is straightforward: ServiceNow’s April 22, 2026 print. If a deeply embedded workflow platform still shows resilient growth after three years of AI hype, that is evidence the SaaS market is expanding and the profit pool is concentrating in systems of record, not just raw model endpoints.