Let me ask you a simple question.
When was the last time you were genuinely excited to buy a pre-AI SaaS tool? Not “fine with it.” Not “it gets the job done.” Genuinely excited. The way you were excited the first time you saw Slack replace email threads. Or the first time Figma made you forget Sketch existed. Or the first time Notion made you feel like your entire company’s knowledge actually lived somewhere.
I’ll wait.
Now let me ask you a harder one:
When was the last time you felt like you were overpaying on a renewal for a pre-AI SaaS tool — and seriously thought about cancelling?
I bet that one’s a lot more recent.
Hence, the markets.
Now ask yourself. How do your customers feel about both these points? Be brutally honest.
The “SaaSpocalypse” Is Real. But It’s Not What You Think.
IGV is down 22% from its highs. Monday.com just cratered 17% on a beat-and-raise. The average forward P/E for enterprise software has collapsed from 39x to 21x in four months — the sharpest compression since 2002. Traders at Jefferies are literally calling it the “SaaSpocalypse.”
The narrative everywhere is that AI agents are going to kill SaaS. That vibe coding means your customers will just build their own tools now. That Claude Cowork and Agentforce are coming for every seat license you’ve ever sold.
That narrative is mostly wrong. Nobody is going to vibe-code their way to replacing Workday or ServiceNow next quarter.
But here’s what is true, and what too many founders and CEOs aren’t being honest about:
Your product probably isn’t magical anymore. And your customers know it.
“Do We Really Need All This?”
Let’s look at what’s actually happening beneath the market panic.
Public SaaS growth rates have declined every single quarter since the 2021 peak. The AI crash narrative just gave the market permission to finally reprice what the numbers have been screaming for three years.
NRR across the industry has fallen off a cliff. Even the top quartile of companies at $15M-30M+ ARR can’t hit 100% NRR anymore. HubSpot’s NRR dropped to 100% — which means they need to add 23% net new customers just to grow 23%. ZoomInfo’s tech NRR is sitting around 85%. And those are the good companies.
What does that mean in plain English?
Your existing customers aren’t expanding. They’re flat. Or they’re cutting seats. Or they’re looking at renewal invoices and asking their CFO: “Do we really need all this?”
And for the first time in the SaaS era, many of them have a credible alternative to “yes.”
The Magic Test
Here’s what I’ve been asking founders lately, and I want you to ask yourself the same thing:
- Can your customers truly talk to your B2B app — for real? As well or better than they can talk to ChatGPT or Claude?
- Can your customers just tell your app what they want it to do — and it goes off and does it? Almost … magically?
- Do your customers wake up and think: “I can’t wait to use [your product] today”? Do they still rave about? Do you still make your customers … heroes?
If the answer is no — and for most pre-AI SaaS products right now, it is no — then you have a problem that no amount of sales execution or customer success playbooks will fix.
The product used to be magical. Version 1.0 was a revelation. It replaced spreadsheets, or manual processes, or some nightmare legacy system that made everyone’s life miserable. Of course it felt magical. Going from nothing to something always does.
But somewhere along the way — maybe around year 4, or year 6, or after you’d shipped 200 incremental features that each individually made sense but collectively turned your product into a bloated, confusing mess — the magic died.
And you didn’t notice. Because NRR was still 115% and growth was still 40% and the market was still forgiving and customers were still locked into 3-year contracts.
The lock-in is ending. The contracts are coming up for renewal. And your customers are asking the question you’ve been dreading: “Is this still worth it?”
What “Worth It” Means Now
Here’s the thing that’s changed. “Worth it” used to mean “better than the alternative.” And the alternative was usually doing things manually, or using some terrible on-prem system from 2007, or duct-taping together five different tools.
Now the alternative might be an AI agent that does 80% of what your product does for a fraction of the cost. Or an AI-native startup that was built from scratch to solve the exact same problem, but with a fundamentally different architecture — one where the AI isn’t bolted on, it’s the foundation.
The bar for “worth it” just went up by 10x.
Every dollar a company spends on your seat license is now a dollar they’re not spending on AI infrastructure, AI tooling, or AI headcount. Meta is spending $135B on AI capex. Microsoft is spending $75B. When the hyperscalers alone are pouring $470B+ into AI infrastructure, that money is coming from somewhere.
It’s coming from your renewal budget.
The Two Paths Forward
So what do you do if you’re sitting at $20M, $50M, $100M ARR and your growth has slowed from 60% to 30% and your NRR is sliding toward 95%?
Path 1: Be honest and rebuild the magic.
This is what Intercom did. They bet everything on AI — built Fin, their AI agent — and it’s now doing 1M+ resolutions per week. They didn’t just add an “AI feature.” They fundamentally reimagined what their product could do and rebuilt accordingly.
Filevine did it. Their new AI revenue now exceeds their SaaS revenue on a quarter-over-quarter basis. They didn’t bolt on a chatbot. They transformed.
The companies that will win are the ones where the CEO wakes up tomorrow and says: “Our product isn’t magical anymore. And we’re going to fix that — even if it means rebuilding half of what we’ve built.”
That takes courage. It takes being honest with your board, your team, and yourself.
Intercom/Fin’s tough story on doing just that here:
Path 2: Pretend it’s fine and harvest.
Raise prices on existing customers. Cut R&D. Optimize margins. Tell your board the “macro is tough” and that growth will reaccelerate “next quarter.”
This is what most companies will do. And the market is now pricing this in. That’s why multiples compressed from 39x to 21x. The market isn’t stupid. It knows the difference between growth and harvesting. And harvesting gets a very different multiple.
The Honest Conversation You Need to Have
Here’s what I’d do if I were running a B2B company right now with slowing growth:
Get in a room with your 10 best customers. Not a QBR. Not a feedback session. A real conversation. Ask them: “When was the last time our product genuinely surprised you? When was the last time it felt like magic?”
Listen to the silence. That silence is your roadmap.
Then ask: “What would make you excited to renew — not obligated to renew, but excited?”
Because the old playbook — where you could grow 20-30% on the back of price increases, long-term contracts, and switching costs — is evaporating. The new playbook demands that your product be so good that cancellation feels unthinkable. Not because of lock-in. Because of love.
The SaaS Crash Has Been Happening Since 2022. AI Is Just The Accelerant. Products Got Just Too Stale.
The SaaS crash of 2026 isn’t AI killing software. It’s the market finally pricing in three years of deceleration, plus the dawning realization that the next wave of software has to be fundamentally better than what we’ve built so far.
Some companies will adapt. They’ll rebuild, reinvent, and come out the other side with products that are genuinely magical again. Those companies are going to be worth a fortune.
The rest will slowly get starved of budget, growth, and eventually relevance.
So be honest with yourself. Is your product still magical?
It probably used to be.
The question is: can you make it magical again?
That’s the only question that matters right now.
