The modern unicorn SaaS startup is essentially subscription middleware that could be a Bash script written by a neural network in under a day.— Myself; 2024
These services which I half-jokingly refer to as "unAIcorns" usually consist of a set of fairly simple integrationsIronically, these integrations are often written by AI tools, as their owners lack the required skill or desire to implement them properly., with a fixed rate or dynamic price attached based on usageStripe is the payment processor of choice for most SaaS startups in the United States, likely due to having excellent documentatin and readily available SDKs for a variety of platforms. In China it's typically integrated into Weixin Pay (微信支付) or Alipay (支付宝), with a variety of apps offering their own alternatives to limited success.. Most of these modern-day unicorns are in the business of selling simplicity to (the detriment of) the end user while boasting about the prospect of hyper-growth and market domination to investors.
In recent times, this has been proven successful more often than not, causing more startups to go in this direction until the snowball effect gains too much momentum to go ignoredThe same effect was seen with the cloud, mobile-first, blockchain, and 'smart' devices prior to AI.. Based on the recent entrants to Y Combinator and Product Hunt being almost exclusively AI frontends for ChatGPT with a quirk or two, this strategy appears to work very well, at the cost of longevityMore often than not, these endeavours are set up to capitalize on a trend and squeeze everything out of it that they can, rather than actually improve anything..