Yet another Hacker News

44 points stanislavb 3 hours ago 23 comments

The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard That's a huge drop. And, it matches my "human" observations. A lot of products are being vibe coded, released, and soon after that abandoned. It's become too cheap to produce software. So, a lot of people have been experimenting for 'free' with their ideas - only to find out that they weren't viable... or that they couldn't bring customers in. Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free.

Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening product lifespan to continue even further down. Or maybe, at some point people will realised that there are no users for their products as every user can "build" their own and custom product. Leaving us with a dozen huge platforms that host and help you build those apps. Until then - it's a crazy gold rush and a lot of makers are abandoning their empty buckets.

snarky-comments 2 hours ago | parent

This could signal a healthy fail fast competitive market. Maybe?

archargelod 1 hour ago | parent

Fail fast, with no one succeeding is not healthy.

One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?

derektank 30 minutes ago | parent

This is the median lifespan. If the number of total products is increasing, that doesn’t suggest that fewer products are succeeding. You could even have more products succeeding, if the number of failures is growing even faster

benoau 2 hours ago | parent

Death of the sunk-cost fallacy, you launch a thing and nobody gives a shit especially you yourself.

However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

> Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free.

Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".

jfdi 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting, thanks for posting

ibn_khaldun 1 hour ago | parent

Software is in its SoundCloud rap era.

pianopatrick 1 hour ago | parent

Now that barriers to entry are going down, I think software will become a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games.

manmal 1 hour ago | parent

Certainly not for infrastructure.

pianopatrick 1 hour ago | parent

Arguably there have been fads for infrastructure, just on a longer time scale.

sublinear 40 minutes ago | parent

> a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games

That doesn't track at all.

When the movie and music industries were pumping out their biggest hits, the production cost was high. Profit may be higher now in the modern era while costs are lower, but would you honestly (seriously honestly please) call most of the remake/homage slop we've had since the late 2000s "hits"? This simply isn't survivorship bias either. Just look at what music stands the test of time on youtube and spotify or gets people at least smiling in real life. Look at the variety of genres too. Look at when we had the highest density of solid audience ratings for even run-of-the-mill or cult movies.

You can say all you want that these industries "always did this" and insist that when you look at your own list of favorites it's just because you're getting old, but that's more obviously denial as the years of this bullshit have racked up. Even the artists agree even when they're finding success at this game, and they have the same resentment. Younger people don't even care about movies and music anymore while older people desperately pay and hope for new stuff like it's another pull of the increasingly rigged slot machine. It's not even that younger people are more interested in social media. That excuse is just as clearly false when you see how hard they go on retro styles and what they also have saved on playlists.

pianopatrick 23 minutes ago | parent

"hit driven" in the business model sense.

The movie studio business model depends on putting out a whole lot of stuff and having a few big hits earn enough to cover the losses from the flops.

Now that software is basically "dollars in, software out", companies will probably put out a lot more software. Similar to movie studios, most of this software will not hit, but the few things that do hit can earn back the costs of the things that do not.

sublinear 20 minutes ago | parent

I don't know. I still think you're looking at this from the consumer side exactly the way they want you to.

In business, some of the most reliable returns come from predicting when the wheels fall off and riding that sucker until the bitter end. The "hits" don't matter anymore to that kind of business. The area under that tail part of the curve can be much larger than the area under the earlier peaks when consumers were most enthusiastic.

kristopolous 34 minutes ago | parent

it's always been like that. how far back do we want to go? mootools versus jquery? flash? foxpro and vb? cp/m and dos?

software has always been a popularity contest

smolgumball 1 hour ago | parent

Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.

Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.

byzantinegene 41 minutes ago | parent

this website itself is vibecoded slop, a quick look at the listings shows hallucinations.

dehrmann 37 minutes ago | parent

Not SaaS, but I had an idea for using a CPU emulator to run a compiled binary under Java, with libc implemented in Java so standard file IO works. I punted on the idea because it seemed pretty difficult and maybe take six months. I recently gave Claude a Java RISC V emulator and a partial bridge between Java and libc, and in under an hour, it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.

I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.

endriju 33 minutes ago | parent

Software used to solve problems for users. Now AI is solving most problems for users, but not all (although ever increasing). I think software needs to evolve to solve the category of problems that AI is not (yet) good at. For example very hard (extreme long horizon) problems in digital space which are still expensive to solve. Some domains overlapping with real-world and restricted/regulated industries are also not yet disrupted by AI to the level regular SaaS is. To get ahead one needs to start in those domains now, as it will get much harder once AI will start eating them.

kristopolous 31 minutes ago | parent

Testing products, getting a feel for them, thinking about them, talking and exploring, I mean this is still there and it's long been the actual time-consuming part of making great software; where the soft skills intersect with the hard.

Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.

Quality has become less work, but only by a little.

But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...

It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.

The question is, why are you spending your time building things? Is it to make things that are finely crafted? Is it the road to wealth? As a tool to get other work done? Just make sure you have an answer.

It's your time after all...

keiferski 28 minutes ago | parent

Distribution and marketing have always been more important. The hard part has always been being consistent, not having a half-baked prototype.

Frankly AI is making people even lazier than before, which means that anyone willing to stick around and be consistent is probably the winner.

hebetude 25 minutes ago | parent

However, my ability to produce a lot of really useful software for myself has gone way up. None of them are over a year yet but I use them more than the non personalized apps they replaced

Maxzrco 17 minutes ago | parent

I would 100% agree on that. Now REA comes in again and in a few years everybody could clone big and complex software. I think a software will need more than features in the future.

It will need licences, or content others could not deliver. Really something you can’t clone that fast.

I think about Netflix, Spotify, Amazon. You can clone all this platforms but will never have the rights, artists or the logistics for example.

Maxzrco 15 minutes ago | parent

I would 100% agree on that. Now REA comes in again and in the future everyone can clone complex software.

I think distribution become more important than ever. And having something you can’t clone on day 1. I think about Amazon, Netflix, Spotify.

You can clone the platforms but not the licences, artists logistic etc…