Adam Boqian Ma

Adam Boqian Ma

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The Great Unbundling: Why the Post-SaaS Era Belongs to the “Sovereign Stack”

3 minute read

Published:

We are watching the slow-motion collapse of the B2B SaaS model as we know it.

For two decades, the logic was simple: Buy, don’t build. Engineering talent was too scarce to waste on internal CRMs. So, we rented. We paid monthly subscriptions for generic software that solved 80% of our problems and created 20% new ones.

But that economic equation has just inverted.

As noted in the viral “SaaS is Dying” thesis circulating in VC circles, and echoed by reports from CTech, we are witnessing a fundamental shift. With the rise of “vibe coding” (natural language programming) and agentic workflows, the marginal cost of writing software is racing toward zero.

If you can build a bespoke, enterprise-grade internal tool in a weekend with an AI agent, why would you pay $50k a year for a rigid SaaS contract?

“B2B SaaS” isn’t dying because we don’t need software. It’s dying because the Rent-vs-Build arbitrage is gone.

So, what happens next?

1. The Rise of the “Component Economy”

We are moving from buying buildings to buying bricks.

Future companies won’t buy a monolithic CRM like Salesforce. Instead, they will adopt what Gartner defines as the Composable Enterprise. They will buy:

  • A world-class database infrastructure.
  • A specialized UI kit.
  • A proprietary data enrichment API.

They will then have their internal AI agents stitch these components together. The next unicorn won’t sell a “Platform”; they will sell the high-fidelity ingredients that allow companies to bake their own cakes.

2. Service-as-Software (The Agentic Shift)

The B2B SaaS model sold you a tool to make employees efficient. The next model sells you the outcome.

This is the “Service-as-Software” thesis pioneered by Foundation Capital. We won’t subscribe to accounting software; we will subscribe to an “AI Accountant” that lives in our cloud and just does the work.

The value metric shifts from Seats (User Licenses) to Work Done (Outcomes). As seen with Salesforce’s Agentforce pricing and Intercom’s Fin AI, companies are beginning to charge per conversation or resolution, not per login. You aren’t paying for the interface; you are paying for the execution.

3. The “Sovereign Stack”

This is the biggest shift. Companies will return to owning their software.

Data privacy and IP leakage are the new existential threats. With giants like IBM launching “Sovereign Core” and NVIDIA championing Sovereign AI, the market is signaling that companies can no longer afford to pump proprietary data into a multi-tenant SaaS black box.

The future is Single-Tenant by Default.

  • You own the code (generated by your agents).
  • You own the data (stored in your private cloud).
  • You run it on your own infrastructure.

The “vendor” of the future provides the blueprint, but the software lives in your house.

The Bottom Line

The era of the “Generic Wrapper” is over. If your SaaS product is just a slightly better UI over a database, you are now competing with your customer’s internal engineering team—and thanks to AI, that team just got 100x faster.

We aren’t entering a world without software. We are entering a world where everyone is a software company.

Sources Referenced

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