API Economy Surpasses SaaS in Value, $2.5T in 2024

Your SaaS pricing model is leaving millions on the table. Many founders still cling to flat fees or treat integrations as an afterthought. This might have worked in the early days of SaaS, but the market has matured beyond simple customer acquisition. This outdated thinking creates invisible leaks. Churn creeps up, growth stalls, and your truly valuable customers end up underpaying. You are leaving real money and long term loyalty on the table. The model isnt dying, it is evolving. The smart money is building platforms with deep, native intelligence. → Integrations become core, not bolt ons. They orchestrate workflows, making your product indispensable and sticky. → Pricing aligns directly with customer value, not just features. Think usage based or outcome focused, driven by robust data. → The product itself guides the customer journey. It surfaces upgrades and proactively addresses issues before churn even thinks about happening. Stop chasing endless features. Start building intelligence into your core offering. Design value centric pricing from day one. Make your product the ultimate churn killer. What is one "invisible leak" in your current SaaS model you wish you fixed sooner? https://lnkd.in/dku5iWn5 #SaaS #SaaSGrowth #FounderLessons #PricingStrategy #ProductLedGrowth #B2BSaaS

Is your automation bill growing faster than your business? Haa, I see this happen way too often. We all love "drag and drop." It’s fast and easy to start. But there’s a tipping point where convenience becomes a "success tax." Platforms like Make or n8n are brilliant... until you scale. Suddenly, you’re paying thousands just because your business is doing what it’s supposed to: growing. Frankly, it’s a bit crazy. At high volume, a solid developer and a $20/month VPS can handle the same workload for a fraction of the cost. You move from unpredictable "per operation" billing to a fixed, manageable overhead. No-code has its place, but as a leader, you have to ask: Are we paying for the solution, or just for the interface? The "easy" way can be the most expensive in the long run. Anyone else feeling the pinch of usage-based pricing? Or have you made the jump to custom code yet? Let's chat in the comments! #BigBearAutomations #Automation #NoCode #SaaS #Scalability #VPS https://lnkd.in/eKbi6aBJ

⌚ Facebook Marketplace API in 2026: a practical guide for software developers Learn how to work with Facebook Marketplace API, access product, order, inventory, and customer data, and understand Meta partner requirements for building compliant, scalable integrations. 👉 Read the full article: https://bit.ly/3ZMw9PL #FacebookMarketplaceAPI #eCommerceDevelopers #APIIntegration #SaaS #SocialCommerce

At TechMalba, we spend a lot of time fixing our own workflows before offering solutions to others. One of those internal efforts led to the creation of Sendium — a focused email campaign system built for clarity, speed, and reliability. Designed for real-world usage: Real-time campaign visibility Seamless multi-device access Clean, distraction-free execution Sendium is currently an internal tool, actively used and refined within TechMalba. We believe strong products are shaped by daily use, not announcements. Building thoughtfully. Improving continuously. #TechMalba #ProductThinking #SaaS #BuildInPublic #StartupLife

🚀 HubSpot Service Keys just entered beta and I am trying to understand what really changed Until now, for authentication we mainly had: OAuth   Private App tokens 🚀 OAuth OAuth is clear. User clicks connect.   App stores access and refresh tokens.   Used for multi portal SaaS integrations. Good for:   ⭐ Marketplace apps   ⭐ Multi customer SaaS   ⭐ Webhook based integrations 🚀 Private App tokens Private App tokens were common for backend work. You generate a token inside a portal and use it in your server. Used for:   ⭐ ETL jobs   ⭐ Data warehouse sync   ⭐ Internal automation   ⭐ Backend scripts Server → HubSpot API   Using a static token. 🚀 Now we have Service Keys I created one in the UI. At first glance, it feels very similar to a Private App token. ⭐ You select scopes.   ⭐ You get a key.   ⭐ You use it in your backend. From what I understand so far, HubSpot is separating: OAuth apps → multi portal integrations   Service Keys → single portal backend access Which makes sense architecturally. 🚀 One clear difference Service Keys do not support webhooks. So:   ⭐ HubSpot cannot push events to your system   ⭐ You cannot rely on real time triggers   ⭐ You are in polling mode only Meaning your backend must call HubSpot on a schedule and check for changes. 🚀 Real example If you are pulling: ⭐ Deals   ⭐ Contacts   ⭐ Emails Every 3 hours into BigQuery, It might behave almost the same as a Private App token. So I am still testing to see if there are deeper differences beyond governance and positioning. If you have already moved from Private Apps to Service Keys, what changed for you in practice? #HubSpot #HubSpotAPI #Integrations #RevOps

The SaaSpocalypse is Real The death of SaaS has dominated tech news and discussion recently, and justifiably so, household names like Salesforce have already seen their stock price drop almost 30% this year. So is the fear of AI eating SaaS overblown? Probably not; things will change rapidly this year in the software market. Payments companies are seeing the clearest shift, as their SaaS customer billing is quickly dropping in favor of the metered billing associated with AI. The change is so fast that Stripe paid ~$1B last month to acquire usage billing company Metronome. People managing billion-dollar portfolios in the public markets are very nervous about anything digital, versus physical. A running joke—or reality—is that Gold is now the only safe asset after decades of tech dominance. This week I hosted a dinner with some Y-Combinator founders and most of them were using Claude to build custom software in real time based on their daily needs. At Sterling Road, we're doing the same thing: our CRM, reporting and jobs website were all 'vibe-coded' at huge price reductions compared to the market leaders. For example: Affinity, a popular VC CRM, costs around $30k/year, per seat. In contrast, our custom CRM was built using a ~$100/year Replit plan, is tailored to our workflow and has no usage limits. With cost and outcome differentials like these, customer expectations for both retention and new sales will be drastically higher. That doesn't mean every company will suddenly build its entire software stack but it does mean only the best and most defensible products will survive. 

Observability Costs & Performance: Driving SaaS Migrations Why do users really switch software tools? It's often not about a shiny new feature, but deep-seated frustrations. We're seeing a clear trend on Reddit: high observability costs and performance bottlenecks are major triggers for SaaS migrations. Think about the common scenario of someone moving from Elastic to Loki for real-time logging – it's driven by a need for better cost-efficiency and streamlined performance. These discussions are goldmines for understanding true market demand. They reveal unmet needs, unexpected costs, and performance gaps that make users actively seek alternatives. At RalixAI, we pinpoint these 'switching triggers' by analyzing millions of Reddit conversations. We extract explicit pain points, frustrations, and direct recommendations that shape product roadmaps, refine messaging, and inform competitive positioning. Want to know *why* your competitors are losing users, or how to preemptively address customer churn? Insights from real customer language are your most powerful asset. #SaaS #MarketIntelligence #CustomerInsights #ProductMarketing #GrowthMarketing #RalixAI

Every SaaS is becoming an API. Whether it wants to or not. 👇 If AI agents mediate software consumption, three structural shifts follow: 1. UI stops being the moat 2. Switching costs collapse 3. Pricing power compresses Historically, SaaS companies justified premium pricing through: • Workflow lock-in • Training costs • Migration friction • User muscle memory Agents eliminate all four An agent doesn’t care about your interface. It cares about: - Latency - Reliability - Structured data - Error handling If switching vendors is just pointing to a new API endpoint, friction disappears. And when friction disappears, pricing power follows. This pushes many SaaS categories toward utility economics. Salesforce margins → Twilio margins. Not all companies will suffer. Those with: • Proprietary data • Regulatory lock-in • Deep transaction embedding will retain power. But UI-heavy SaaS? Compression is coming. As an investor, this changes evaluation criteria: ❌ Beautiful dashboards ❌ Feature overload ✅ API depth ✅ Data defensibility ✅ Agent-friendly auth ✅ Machine-readable workflows The shift isn’t B2B. It’s B2A - Business to Agent. The agent evaluates. The human approves. If you’re building SaaS today, ask yourself: Is your product a dashboard? Or an infrastructure layer for agents? That difference will define valuation outcomes in the next cycle.

The SaaS industry just performed its greatest magic trick. 🔮The Pledge: "We're building the Agentic Enterprise." 🪄 The Turn: 72% of Salesforce's growth now comes from price increases, not new customers. 🙃 The Prestige: $730 billion in market value gone in weeks. A major airline CIO told me last week his team found vendors quietly bundling AI costs into per-seat licenses with zero transparency. His response? He went directly to the foundation model companies. Bypassed the SaaS layer entirely. Per-seat pricing is dying. The new app stores are being built on foundation models. And vendors are building products that destroy their own revenue model. Have a read: Part 1 of The SaaS Squeeze. Link in comments 👇

What you’re about to see shouldn’t be possible. In this demo, I build a fully functional enterprise-grade NetSuite to Shopify integration in under 2 minutes — from a single prompt. No developer. No coding. No professional services ticket. Just: "I need to pull items from NetSuite and create them in Shopify." MindCloud’s AI agent: • Reads API documentation • Builds the workflow • Loops through items • Maps product fields • Creates the Shopify product • Returns the live product ID Then I modify the integration in real-time by typing: "Add a tag from NetSuite." Normally? That’s a developer change. Or a paid services request. Here? It’s a chat message. This is what conversational AI + integration actually looks like in the real world. If you use: • NetSuite • Shopify • Or any mission-critical SaaS stack This changes everything. 👉 Start building for free: https://lnkd.in/eawZkJxe 👉 Learn more about AI-driven integrations: https://lnkd.in/er2BXtmW We’re just getting started.