# AI Is a Ticking Time Bomb for SaaS ```yaml url: "https://forg.to/articles/ai-is-a-ticking-time-bomb-for-saas" title: "AI Is a Ticking Time Bomb for SaaS" excerpt: "And why I'm weirdly happy I never built my idea. The idea I almost built I had an idea. An AI agent that lives on its own computer. Signs into your apps. Works while you sleep. Pings you only when it needs your approval. I got excited. I opened a doc…" author: "Kislay" author_url: "https://forg.to/@kislay" published: 2026-10-10 updated: 2026-10-10 read_time_minutes: 5 cover_image: "https://res.cloudinary.com/dxkpmcrel/image/upload/v1791647360/forg/articles/vszghbxfan4v8ykfk4pt.jpg" ``` ## TL;DR And why I'm weirdly happy I never built my idea. The idea I almost built I had an idea. An AI agent that lives on its own computer. Signs into your apps. Works while you sleep. Pings you only when it needs your approval. I got excited. I opened a doc… ## Content *And why I'm weirdly happy I never built my idea.* ## The idea I almost built I had an idea. An AI agent that lives on its own computer. Signs into your apps. Works while you sleep. Pings you only when it needs your approval. I got excited. I opened a doc. I started sketching. Then life happened. Classic. Then this happened: - **August 11:** SpaceXAI and Cursor launched **Grok Bot**. Every bot gets its own cloud computer and signs into the apps you already use. - **September 8:** Meta launched **Muse**. Dedicated cloud VM. Sends emails, books travel, keeps working after you close the app. - **September 29:** OpenAI launched **Dots**. Own cloud computer, own browser, 4,000+ apps through plugins. Three launches. About seven weeks. My exact idea, three times, from companies with more GPUs than I have brain cells. If I had started building, I'd be sitting on a dead product and a pile of wasted evenings. I'm not sad about it. I'm **relieved**. Which is a strange thing to feel about a product that doesn't exist. ## Why this is the new normal for SaaS The old SaaS risk: a competitor copies you. You had months to react. The new SaaS risk: **the platform ships your product as a feature.** You have a Tuesday. And here's the kicker. Your users already pay for ChatGPT or Claude. Your product costs extra. Their version is "included." Guess who wins that fight. There is no warning. No countdown. No "heads up, we're launching your startup next week." That's what makes it a **time bomb**. Not that it explodes. That you can't hear the ticking. ## Case file 1: Chegg Chegg is the big one. Its stock went above $100 in 2021. Subscribers grew from 1.5 million in 2016 to 8.2 million in 2022. Then ChatGPT showed up and gave students the same homework help for free. What followed: - **22% layoffs** in May 2025 - **45% layoffs** in October 2025 (388 roles) - Stock down roughly **99%** from the peak - An NYSE warning about possible delisting Here's the detail I can't stop thinking about: AI was mentioned **zero times** in Chegg's 2022 annual report. By its 2025 filing, the company was admitting students see tools like ChatGPT as strong alternatives to specialized products like Chegg. Chegg even sued Google over AI Overviews. **Suing is not a moat.** Chegg is still operating. But it's managing decline, not growth. ## Case file 2: Stack Overflow Stack Overflow peaked at around 207,000 new questions a month in 2014. The numbers today depend on which tracker you trust. The gentlest one shows a drop of about 75%. The harshest one counted just 1,304 questions in July 2026. No version of that chart looks healthy. To be fair, the decline started years before ChatGPT. Strict moderation and the whole "search first, you idiot" culture didn't help. But AI changed the math. Asking a chatbot is instant and nobody downvotes you. IDE assistants removed the act of asking altogether. Both things are true. **AI just stepped on the gas.** ## Case file 3: The small ones nobody tweets about The giants get the headlines. The small teams get the funerals. - **Relay:** a five-year-old AI workflow automation tool, pitched as a Zapier alternative. Shut down in September 2026 as OpenAI, Google and others built similar automation into their own products. - **Huxe:** an AI audio app from ex-NotebookLM developers. Shut down in May 2026, partly because bigger platforms offered similar experiences to huge existing audiences. - **Notion Mail:** launched in April 2025, shutting down September 22. Reason: users were handing their inboxes to separate AI agents anyway. And even OpenAI kills its own stuff. The **Atlas browser** lasted less than a year before being folded into ChatGPT. Same story with **Operator**. If OpenAI won't keep standalone products alive, your side project doesn't get a special exemption. ## Not every SaaS is doomed Quick reality check. Chegg had problems before ChatGPT. So did Stack Overflow. AI wasn't the only factor. And plenty of software is much harder to replace with a prompt. The pattern is not "all SaaS dies." The pattern is **"thin SaaS dies first."** ## The test I now run before building anything Ask one question: > If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Meta shipped this exact feature tomorrow, would my customers still stay? If your honest answer is "uh...", you're holding a ticking clock. From what I've seen, the things that tend to survive: - **Data they can't get elsewhere.** Proprietary, accumulated, hard to copy. - **Deep workflow.** Embedded in how a team actually operates, not a nice add-on. - **Trust and distribution.** Compliance, relationships, a community that shows up. - **Boring niches.** Things the labs won't bother building. That's my take, not a law of physics. But it's the filter I use now. ## What I learned I almost spent months on something three giants shipped within seven weeks. One day of research saved me from that. So before you build, spend a day checking whether the giants are about to. It's the cheapest due diligence you'll ever do. And if they already did? Congrats. You just saved your semester. ## What I'm building instead My new rule: **build things the big AI companies are unlikely to build.** Not because AI is bad. I use it every day. But the labs chase the big, general-purpose stuff. A narrow tool where AI isn't the main point? Rarely on their roadmap. So I'm building **recordful.app**. It's a Chrome extension for screen recording. You hit record. You hit stop. And it instantly turns your raw recording into an **edited video** you can customize. No dragging clips around a timeline. No "I'll edit it later" that never happens. The core of it isn't AI. It's a workflow and a product experience. That's exactly the kind of thing I don't expect a trillion-dollar lab to ship next Tuesday. Could I be wrong? Of course. That's why I keep running the test. ## Links - Article: https://forg.to/articles/ai-is-a-ticking-time-bomb-for-saas - Author: https://forg.to/@kislay - Forg: https://forg.to --- Published on [Forg](https://forg.to), a social network for people who create and ship on the internet. _HTML version: https://forg.to/articles/ai-is-a-ticking-time-bomb-for-saas_