I’m not building another SaaS product. I refuse.
The model is broken. It’s a trap for users and a creative dead-end for builders. Software-as-a-Service has become a euphemism for 'Dashboard-as-a-Service' — a rental agreement for a tool you still have to manually operate, day in and day out. It doesn't deliver a result. It delivers a login.
That’s no longer good enough. The future isn't another piece of software you have to learn. It's an agent that already knows what to do.
Let’s be honest about what the SaaS model has become. It’s a commercial framework optimised for shareholder value, not user outcomes. The entire engine is built on monthly recurring revenue (MRR) extracted via per-seat licences. The incentive isn't to solve your problem and get out of the way; it's to entrench the software so deeply into your workflows that the friction of leaving is too high.
It’s a model that rewards complexity. The more features, the more integrations, the more 'value' you can claim to justify the annual price hike. Users become captives, forced to navigate bloated interfaces and pay for a dozen features they never touch just to access the two they actually need.
Look at a UK stalwart like Sage. It's a behemoth built on accounting software that has dominated small business finance for decades. But it's a classic SaaS playbook: you log in, you manually reconcile, you run reports, you do the work. The software is a passive, complicated tool. It helps you do the job, but it will never, ever do the job for you. That is the glass ceiling of SaaS. You are always the operator.
This creates the illusion of productivity. We spend our days switching between tabs, exporting CSVs, and translating data from one dashboard to another, feeling busy. But this isn't work. It’s digital admin. Marketers are not employed to copy-paste data; they are employed to generate profitable demand. The SaaS stack has become a distraction from that core purpose.
From 'Software-as-a-Service' to 'Result-as-a-Service'
The alternative is not better SaaS. It's a different model entirely: agentic AI. Where SaaS provides the tools for you to do a job, an AI agent is the one that does the job.
Think about the typical marketing workflow for competitor analysis.
The SaaS Way: 1. Log into your SEO tool (£150/month). 2. Log into your social listening tool (£300/month). 3. Log into your ads intelligence tool (£500/month). 4. Manually run searches for three competitors. 5. Export data to three separate spreadsheets. 6. Attempt to merge the data, normalise it, and find an insight. 7. Paste a screenshot into a PowerPoint deck. 8. Present findings that are already a week out of date.
The Agentic Way: 1. Define the goal: 'Continuously monitor my three main competitors and deliver a prioritised weekly report on their strategic marketing changes.' 2. Receive the report.