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Start free trial →Product Growth · Product & Design · November 2026
Aakash Gupta asked whether people will just build their own software with AI instead of paying for SaaS. Webflow's CEO says some customers who tried to replace it with a vibe-coded site have come back.
…I have to put into maintaining the software versus buying the software? And if the total cost of ownership doesn't add up, then like no one's going to vibe code it because it is so much more expensive to hire great talent and have that talent building something that's not critical to your business.
Right.
And so that's why SaaS exists in the first place. That's why people don't, you know, there are a lot of things that have turned into SaaS. Businesses like companies that manage payments or companies that help you with literally authentication. Like, these are all things you can absolutely build. And people have built it on their own, but they've realized that managing just that part of their product makes no sense because it is so much effort to do something that someone else can build for you. And you can put your resources on things that are really specific to your business. And so I think that analysis is finally happening because, like, there's the joy of building anything and building everything on your own. And then there's the realization of, oh, you can't just build it instead and forget it. Like, you have to keep maintaining it. And the cost of doing that is so painful. And so you have to go do a TCO analysis. And I do think that that's frankly where people are starting to see change. Like, we have a group internally, we call them our boomerangs. But it's folks who are like, oh, you…
Okay. So let's talk a little bit about whether this compression is justified. If we look at even those categories you just talked about, like payments, for instance, PayPal's multiple has collapsed. And that's one of the categories we're talking about. Well, that might actually make sense not to…
Ouch.
They're like 100x multiple compression or something like that. So is that justified? I