The Future of Products

I wrote earlier about the role of AI in the survival of SaaS products. At the time, it felt like SaaS still had a future, even though custom AI-driven alternatives would push prices down.
Not everyone wants to spend resources on something that is not core to their business.
Today, an enthusiast shared that he built a TypeForm clone for survey generation in 2.5 hours using the Opus 4.5 AI model. And not only did he build it, he open-sourced the code as well.

Why bring this up again?
Because in TypeForm’s case, customers do not really care about long-term support or continuous product evolution. These are simple surveys, and ten years from now they will still be just surveys.

A bit of boring theory 🤓
In product development, there is a concept called stickiness. It describes how hard it is for customers to leave your product.
Stickiness can be business-driven (for example, it makes little sense to leave when the entire company runs on the full suite. Hello, Microsoft 365) or technical (for example, when a product makes data migration difficult or impossible).
When stickiness is low, customers leave easily. That is why vendors try so hard to increase it.

TypeForm’s stickiness is close to zero. Users pay simply to avoid building boring surveys themselves. This is a commodity, and not a very important one.

Now we can build a TypeForm alternative in two hours. But we still need to run infrastructure, and that costs money. Or does it?
Surveys are usually needed for just a few days. In practice, no serious NFRs matter here. You would have to try very hard to launch such a service and break it immediately.

Companies with zero stickiness and simple solutions, where there are no architecturally significant NFRs, are essentially defenceless against modern AI models.

How do you think companies will react when their products become highly vulnerable to AI?

TypeForm has turned into a wrapper around ChatGPT 😜
They now promote prompt-based survey generation as a flagship feature. An external AI generates the survey, and TypeForm deploys it to an external data center.
So why pay TypeForm $29 in this setup?