That used to be a big deal. I don't think it is anymore.

One great thing about the rise of AI is that now it's super easy to make and maintain integrations. This is a place where AI coding uniquely shines due to the points being well defined and mostly quite standard.

This is going to hurt the monopoly power of software companies. But it'll be great for allowing the proliferation of smaller companies, open source, and home grown solutions.

I'm already seeing the pendulum swinging back to local first instead of cloud services.

Creating? Sure. Maintaining? absolutely not.

As someone who has some SaaS products that must connect to other SaaS products, I can tell you that this is somewhere that AI saved me a truck load of time.

A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.

This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.

Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.

At the same time, I think some kind of aggregator will emerge. In music, the tools to create music are so inexpensive that the market is flooded. In games it is becoming the same, now accelerated by LLMs. But there is always some type of aggregator ending up earning the money from most of that, rather than the people creating the content. Not sure how it will work out here, but I predict it will be another type of aggregator.