Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service with a Software Replaces It. — Adrien Gonin<br>PLATE I·SCORE 0000

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Write me ↗<br>← WritingI built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for. And I will never sell it.

Every instinct trained into technical people over the past decade says that’s leaving value on the table. Landing page, Stripe, launch post, recurring revenue. That script is practically a religion in indie circles.

I think that script is now obsolete. What I’m doing instead, I call Service with a Software: private tools that never get sold, built to make one service impossible to compete with. I’d bet it’s the strongest position left for independent builders. Here’s why, starting with the tool I’ll never sell.

The instrument

I’m a designer, and I got tired of AI prototyping tools. Magic Patterns, Figma Make, all of them share the same flaw: they ignore your design system unless you invest serious effort making them merely adequate. So I went around them. I replicated our design system in Tailwind classes, wrote a Claude Code skill around it, and started generating full HTML prototypes. Interactive, on-system by default, higher fidelity than anything Figma gives me.

That created a boring second problem: sharing. Mailing an HTML file is painful. Putting a page on the open web is trivial, but enterprise work needs discretion: password protection, sandboxing, a clean link. The tools offering that put it behind a paywall, when they offer it at all. So I built my own sharing platform on my VPS. Upload, sandbox, password. A few hours.

Here’s why it will never have a pricing page. As a product, it’s nothing: a file host with a password field, cloneable in a weekend. Inside my client work, it’s something no product can be: an experience matched to one company’s design system, one company’s security constraints, one workflow. The moment I generalize it to sell it, I sand off exactly the fit that makes it valuable. The software isn’t the product. It’s an instrument that makes the service around it impossible to compare.

That’s the whole model in miniature. You may know the older cousin, Software with a Service: the SEO consultant who pays for the expensive Ahrefs seat and sells you advice bundled with access to the data. Software is the product, the human is the wrapper. Service with a Software is that model flipped. The service is the product, and private, overfit software is what makes it unrepeatable.

A cute inversion, sure. But why would this be the model now, when for twenty years the smart move was the opposite: escape the service, become the product?

The squeeze

Because AI is crushing small standalone software from both ends at once, and only one end gets talked about.

The visible end is supply. Whatever niche tool you’re sketching this week, a thousand people can prompt a working version by Sunday night. Remember the to-do app every developer ships as a first project, earnest and indistinguishable from ten thousand others? That dynamic now covers the entire micro-SaaS territory.

The quieter end is stranger: the customers are dissolving. I’ve stopped subscribing to a whole layer of tools. No prototyping SaaS, no sharing SaaS. I left no-code site builders like Webflow for a bare VPS and Cloudflare, because building the thing myself became faster than configuring someone else’s abstraction of it. Technical people everywhere are running the same trade: cancel ten small subscriptions, keep the one heavy platform that makes all the building possible. Spend is consolidating into a few dense layers, and the long tail above them is going home-cooked, built for an audience of one and unashamed of it.

So the $15-a-month generalized niche tool is trapped. Nobody needs to buy it, and everybody can build it. But that raises the real question: if the software artifact itself is now nearly worthless, where did the value actually go?

Where the value went

Not far. It moved one layer over, from the artifact to the context around it.

The honest post-mortem of most micro-SaaS was always the same: the build was the easy part. The projects died on distribution, on trust, on being one of forty tabs a tired buyer never reopened. AI made the easy part free, so the game is now entirely the hard part. And the people best positioned for the hard part were never founders starting from zero. They’re the people doing service work, who already hold what founders spend years failing to acquire: a relationship, a real problem, a live loop of trust and feedback. Software deployed inside that context needs no funnel, no onboarding, no churn dashboard. It lands where value already flows.

That’s why the old ladder of ambition, do the work, standardize it, productize it, scale it, has quietly reversed. When anyone can produce the artifact, the defensible thing is the fit.

Which sounds nice until you hit the obvious objection: custom work is exactly what we all learned not to do. Handcrafting a...