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Copying Got Cheap. Trust Didn't.

Everyone says AI killed SaaS because Claude can copy any product. People always copied. What nobody can copy is the trust people put in a brand.

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5 min
A product card and its copy side by side, with the same interface, features, API and pricing page. The original's trust bar is almost full, 8 years on the market; the copy is a dashed outline with an empty trust bar, launched last week, a sticker that says 70% cheaper and a stamp that says who are you? A handwritten note reads: copying got cheap, trust didn't.

Everywhere I go on the internet right now, I read the same thing: the death of software as a service. Now that Claude can copy any software, reverse engineer it and rebuild it, who needs to pay for SaaS anymore?

First, that’s complete bullshit. Somebody has to maintain that copy. Somebody has to pay for it. It’s like piracy. You can pirate any movie or series on the planet, and somehow people still pay for Netflix, Hulu, whatever.

There are a couple of things people get wrong here, and the first one is brand.

Why would I trust your copy?

I’ve seen somebody reverse engineer Resend.com and pitch it as much cheaper. I don’t know who you are. I do not trust you. I trust Resend. I know who they are. They’ve been on the market for a long time. I trust their brand.

Claude copies everything you can see in a weekend. The bottom half takes years, and that is the part people pay for.

One of the moats nowadays is brand trust. It’s actually always been. AI just makes it fucking obvious right now.

Will people still use something cheaper? Absolutely. There’s always a market for whoever offers it cheaper. Will we go and switch to it immediately? No. It will take time for them to earn the trust, the experience, the team. There are just way too many things going into building these products: user experience, hours and hours of research.

Take Resend, or Postmark. You cannot just replicate that super easily. Anyone can copy the API now. What you can’t copy is the trust these companies built: years of people sending their emails through them, those emails landing, and all the other stuff they put out.

Resend keeps giving to the community. They made React Email, an open-source toolkit for building emails that now gets 2 million downloads a week, and in April they open-sourced their email editor too, so anyone can drop it into their own app. Postmark has a whole page of free tools: DMARC reports, a spam checker, ready-made email templates and more. How hard that is to build just goes through the roof.

Isn’t it a bit hypocritical?

All these people say AI is the death of SaaS, and then they literally go and copy-paste a product and start reselling it. What kind of hypocrisy is that? If that’s not hypocrisy and greed, what is? Human greed and hypocrisy haven’t changed for a million years, and they will not change now.

Think about it. If SaaS were dead, there would be nothing to resell. They’re not killing SaaS. They’re starting one. Just a cheaper one, with a name nobody knows.

When does cheaper actually win?

When the brand stops earning the trust.

Look at beehiiv, the newsletter and blogging platform. From what I see, many users are frustrated with the brand, because it hasn’t kept adding anything useful and it kept increasing prices. In that case, moving to something cheaper makes total sense. The brand’s trust is not there anymore. People are losing trust in the brand.

Even their CEO posted that every week someone tells him they’re going to vibe-code their own beehiiv alternative over the weekend. He wished them the best and listed everything they’d need to build. And some people actually did. Marc Lou vibe-coded his own newsletter platform with a few prompts in Claude and left beehiiv, because they had raised prices for the third time in two years.

Trust climbs one kept promise at a time. A cheaper copy only gets in when a brand stops keeping them.

That’s the real danger for a SaaS company. Not Claude, not a clone. Breaking the trust you already earned, and leaving the door open for whoever is cheaper.

How much is a brand worth?

Brand is everything and everywhere. Tomorrow, Kim Kardashian can sell you some exclusive-only thing, and you would pay $5,000 for it. Even with every chance of not getting that exclusive spot, you would pay anyway, because you love her brand.

Brands will sell for millions. If you have the brand, you can even triple the price, and people will buy from you because people trust you.

In the beginning, it’s sales. Then, long term, it’s always, always, always brand and marketing. If you don’t have that long term, you’ll just have to survive on sales, constantly.

Is that impossible? No. There are a lot of companies surviving on sales only. Just look at Salesforce. But even there I would argue Salesforce has a brand. It keeps going because of the brand too.

What did AI actually change?

For my entire career, I talked to founders. They kept copying others. CRMs copying CRMs, feature by feature. They create secret accounts only to see how a competitor does this or that. It’s always the same shit.

Now it just became super easy to copy. That’s the only thing that changed. Brand didn’t change. Brand is brand.

AI made copying cheap. Earning trust still takes as long as it always did.

Who does AI really give power to?

I hate making predictions. But I feel like AI will give more power to the user, just not as much as people think outside the tech bubble. It gives more power to people inside the tech bubble.

Yes, maybe there’s a med student in India who can’t afford a course builder for studying the human body, because buying one costs like $1,000. So he builds his own. I don’t know. But it’s not going to break the world the way people think.

People thought Salesforce was going down. And sure, its stock got hammered this year, down over 25% by August. Meanwhile, the business keeps growing: record revenue, 13% more than a year earlier, and a higher forecast for the year. The panic is in the stock chart. The customers keep paying. There is just too much noise.

So what do you do about clones?

This is for founders, or anyone losing sleep over being cloned. Let people copy. People always copied, and they always will.

The issue always was, is and will be brand. Trust is something to be designed and engineered, and it’s not built in one day. It’s built through years of everything: being on the market, showing up, delivering. Trust is hard earned, and that’s something people do not get.

You just have to keep building trust, day by day. Earn it from your customers, not from a fucking product, UI or sales. Nothing is going to save you unless you make a promise, deliver on that promise and keep building on that promise. It is that simple in this life. There is no other shit around it.

Is it the death of SaaS?

Absolutely not. Will SaaS still be around? Absolutely yes. Will it have to adapt? Yes.

Too much hype, too much noise. We just have to stay focused and not let ourselves think like this. Yes, AI is changing a lot, but it’s not killing a lot. It’s just removing the weeds, the unnecessary weeds, so we can farm something much better.