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The Death of SaaS as We Know It

By Wesley Black

The SaaS model was a revolution in 2005. Instead of buying shrink-wrapped software, you rented it. Automatic updates. No IT department needed. Pay per seat, scale as you grow.

Twenty years later, the revolution has become the problem.

The math doesn’t work anymore

A typical 20-person company in 2026 pays for some combination of: Slack ($15/seat), Google Workspace ($14/seat), HubSpot ($50/seat), Asana ($25/seat), Notion ($10/seat), Salesforce ($75/seat), Zapier ($50/month), plus a dozen smaller tools. That’s easily $50K-$80K per year.

And here’s the kicker: none of these tools share knowledge with each other.

Your CRM doesn’t know what your project manager knows. Your docs don’t know what your email knows. Every tool is a silo with its own login, its own data format, and its own monthly invoice.

AI agents change the equation

An AI agent connected to shared company knowledge can handle:

  • Communication — better than Slack bots and email templates
  • Project tracking — without per-seat Asana pricing
  • CRM functions — because it actually remembers every interaction
  • Automation — without Zapier’s brittle webhook chains
  • Documentation — continuously, not when someone remembers to update the wiki

The key insight isn’t that AI is better at any single task. It’s that one AI agent with shared context replaces five disconnected SaaS tools.

The Snowball effect

SaaS tools are static. They don’t learn. They don’t compound. Salesforce on day 365 is exactly as smart as Salesforce on day 1 — it just has more data in it.

AI agents connected to a shared knowledge base — what we call the Snowball — get smarter every day. Every conversation, every decision, every document makes the whole system more capable.

By month three, your agents know your business. By month six, they’re anticipating needs. By year one, they’re your company’s most valuable asset.

And it’s all stored in plain markdown files. No vendor lock-in. No proprietary formats. If you walk away, you take everything.

The Red Hat model

The software is free. Open source. The expertise is the product. We help you deploy it, configure it, and make sure it actually works for your specific business.

Setup fee plus monthly support. That’s it. No per-seat pricing. No annual contracts. No “enterprise tier” that gates the features you actually need behind a sales call.

The SaaS era gave us convenience at the cost of ownership. The AI era gives us both.