The future of software in 2026: Distribution and the end of mediocrity

#The future of software in 2026: Distribution and the end of mediocrity

Creating software is turning into a mass commodity faster than anyone thought possible. Practically every day I glance at platforms like X or LinkedIn and see someone showing off a new app. Calendar tools resembling Calendly, clone apps for notes in the style of Notion, or huge reservation systems, all this is being built in a proverbial thirty minutes with the help of Claude Code and other artificial intelligence models. Creating simple, functional code is no longer a challenge. Having worked in IT for twenty years, I've seen many transformations, but what we are dealing with today has completely turned the balance of business power upside down.

Having spent many years designing digital solutions, I decided to sit down calmly, take a deep breath, and write down all my key thoughts. In this long but specific post, we will analyze where all this is really heading. Let’s face the truth: the market is changing dramatically, and those who don’t understand this in time will unfortunately have to say goodbye to their companies.

#How SaaS products were built before AI

Learn more about enterprise WordPress development at WPPoland. Before we even dive into what 2026 will bring, let’s step back into the past for a moment. Not so long ago, coming up with your own SaaS (Software as a Service) product meant long months of very expensive engineering work. If you only had an idea for a new platform to support teamwork in the office, you had to set aside a massive budget just for the foundations.

You had to hire a good backend developer (who would take care of databases and servers), a great frontend dev so the app wouldn’t look terrible, and at least a cloud or security specialist, because no corporation would buy a leaky system. Creating the first version, what we popular call a MVP (minimum viable product), often consumed life savings. Code was a barrier, a hard wall to jump over for the average person with a cool business idea, and every working, well-scaling web system was rewarded with awe by the market. People used to say: “Wow, someone actually managed to write this, it works stably, respect.”

#How AI lowers the barrier to building apps

With the early expansion of large language models (such as GPT-4 or the Claude family), the situation shifted massively, almost historically. Suddenly, it turned out that “writing code” stopped being a superpower exclusively for a handful of educated and very expensive-to-maintain engineers. Today, tools can put an app together based on natural language, you simply ask the model to do a specific thing for you, and it does it. It builds a login screen in half a minute, connects a database in another ten minutes. Autonomous agents can now fix compilation errors or search for problems in server logs faster than any junior in your IT department.

Consequently, the barrier to entry for creating digital products basically ceased to exist. Has programming died? Absolutely not! It only changed its level of craft from rare expertise to a commercial commodity. Just like today you buy bread at the local store, instead of growing grain in your own field and grinding flour on a millstone. Coding has been democratized to incredible, previously unimaginable levels. Crowds of “non-technical”, brilliant founders can present their small, working, and very neat service for several hundred users to the world in just two short afternoons. The cost of producing such entry-level technology has plummeted to the floor. This sounds beautiful to people wanting to start their own business, but it is simultaneously a loud alarm for established, older market players who rely on exploiting their entrenched positions.

#How user expectations for apps change in 2026

We need to touch on a rather brutal point in this whole discussion. We used to admire blocky graphic layouts, we rejoiced like little kids that a page loaded on time at all, and that buttons reacted without explicitly crashing the server. A decade ago, we smiled pityingly at the memory of what software looked like at the turn of the century. Today, we smile pityingly at the sight of programs from five short years ago.

In literally dozens of months, by the end of this 2026, people will genuinely roar with laughter commenting on what clunky programming we are currently using today, at this very moment. The standard for what we will consider a “brilliantly designed, beautiful, and ultra-responsive system used by millions” will go up drastically. Programs won’t be allowed to stutter for even a microsecond; user experiences (UX) with apps will perfectly approach the intuition of magical assistants, and any design flaws will be absolutely fatal for an app. The customer, used to high performance, will uninstall a new app with unbelievable speed after just the first minimal, unintuitive stumble of a loading bar. Because creating a beautiful look today is a single prompt, we as users have quickly become extremely spoiled, ungrateful, and painfully brutal in reviewing any innovators of flawed businesses wandering the fringes of good taste. There is no more leniency for “teething problems” after a market debut. If something is to survive commercially, it has to look phenomenal from the first hour.

#Will SaaS move away from per-seat pricing

The demand for solutions won’t disappear. The world is still eagerly absorbing computerization, and all those corporations, small factories, or logistics companies constantly need and improve their software. SaaS (as the well-known business cloud model, where you pay a monthly subscription for a selected good and don’t need company servers) will survive perfectly and bravely. It might lose a bit of its position as a standard subscription based solely on taking annoying fees from the proverbial “new employee’s seat” (the famous “pay per seat”). Why? Mainly because it’s an aging absurdity. Why pay for someone’s seat when that place and position can literally be phased out by a mass automation using digital agents who don’t take vacations? The new billing system will focus strictly and exclusively on the final value delivered to the recipient (pay for outcome).

#Which SaaS vendors already charge per outcome

The move away from pure per-seat billing is already visible in vendor price lists, although it looks more like a hybrid than a clean break. Two public examples, as listed on the vendors’ own pages on 14 October 2026:

Intercom counts an outcome when the customer confirms the issue is resolved, stops asking for help after Fin answers, or when Fin completes a workflow, including a handoff to a human, and it charges once per conversation (Intercom pricing, accessed 14 Oct 2026). Salesforce aims the conversation price at customer-facing agents and states that Flex Credits and conversations cannot be combined in one org (Agentforce pricing, accessed 14 Oct 2026). Both pages say the figures can change.

Two things follow for a small SaaS. First, the unit you bill has to be something the customer can count on their own side: a resolved ticket, a processed invoice, a booked shipment. If the customer cannot verify the number, an outcome price becomes a monthly dispute. Second, neither vendor dropped seats. The person who supervises the agent still pays for access, and the agent’s work is billed on top. A founder pricing a niche product in 2026 can copy that shape instead of betting the whole business on one model.

#Can a small SaaS compete with big tech

Ever since I’ve been in business tech circles, I’ve seen one ruthless, constant, paralyzing pattern of recurring fear. Older readers will probably nod their heads quickly in understanding, because for generations this was the immortal, all-powerful Google; sometimes the mighty Facebook or Apple. Today, we call this monster under the bed and investor bogeyman AI for short.

It’s the fear that in a short, miserable moment, the all-knowing headquarters in Silicon Valley will simply desire your cozy little business plot and step into it with big boots, aggressively mowing down absolutely all local opposition in its path. And from my over twenty years of life and work experience, one phenomenon clearly emerges for now. This old-fashioned race is still very much winnable. Giants always replicate the pattern of massive monoliths from glass-enclosed boxes. They concentrate their efforts broadly - for the masses. Smaller teams of nimble, clever developers will still find absolute oceans of money cleverly hidden in a thousand unmanaged crevices of massive global demand, solving boring and gray everyday market torments in hundreds of smaller or thriving, very profitable branches of the world economy. In these clashes, the smaller teams with faster hands and a better ear to the market usually win - even though the combat dragons of powerful billionaires fly over their heads.

#What is software slop and why it fails

One trend deserves a closer look, because it is the side effect of everything described above. When writing a working app costs almost nothing, the market fills up with what people now call “software slop”: apps that are released quickly, in large numbers, and do not solve a real problem for anyone.

A developer with an LLM can build an app in an evening and publish it the same night. That makes it tempting to skip the question of who actually needs it. So we get another Notion clone or another neat notepad with an AI chat button on top, built on the hope that people will be impressed and pay for it. The result usually has worse support and far less depth than the product it wanted to replace. The market does not need one more nicely animated login screen built over a weekend. It still lacks specific tools for accounting, transport and other unglamorous work. Slop apps ignore those boring realities, compete on looks, and have no answer to the question of why a customer should stay. A business that pays its bills has no patience for tools made fast and without a clear idea of the real problem behind them.

#How to build a SaaS moat that AI clones cannot copy

In 2026 a good-looking interface is not an advantage on its own. Anyone can generate and copy screens, the same way students copy each other’s portfolio projects.

The value of a business sits in things a cloned interface does not include. First, operations: the daily work with people in the field that no model can do from a keyboard. Second, trust: relationships with buyers and decision-makers in larger companies, built over many negotiations. Third, data: years of collected, specific information about how a process really runs. Together these form a moat that a newcomer with a code generator and no capital will struggle to cross. In my view, the safer direction for a software company is not another booking app for consumers but products for business and enterprise customers (B2B), where these barriers matter most and give a product stability over many years.

#Why distribution matters more than code in 2026

If writing and shipping the technology is no longer what decides success, what does, when an app can be generated in two evenings before launch?

My answer is distribution. When the market is full of near-identical copies, the bottleneck is reaching the customer: getting their attention and building a brand people recognise and trust. Thousands of similar products compete side by side, and only steady, well-funded marketing and reach get a product in front of the people who would buy it. Code without reach ends up forgotten, however good it is.

#How to get recommended by AI assistants

Distribution itself is changing too. Users no longer click on sponsored tiles and side banners the way they did on Facebook and the older ad networks fifteen years ago.

A new channel is growing: AI assistants and the optimisation for them. What matters there is not a paid slot at the top of a ranking but being mentioned often and credibly enough that an assistant answering millions of people picks your product and recommends it in a chat window. This is often called “AI SEO”, and ads inside assistants are the next step. Further ahead, I expect a market where company systems buy subscriptions through automated agents, without a person delaying the decision. An agent could add ten licences of a service on its own, and classic reach budgets would matter less for that kind of sale.

#How AI agents will buy products on behalf of users

The idea that automated agents will complete purchases without a person clicking through a checkout now has published specifications behind it. Two open protocols appeared in September 2025:

• Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), announced by Google on 16 September 2025. It extends the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and works alongside the Model Context Protocol. It relies on cryptographically signed mandates: an Intent Mandate records what the user asked for, including rules such as a price limit and timing, and a Cart Mandate records the exact items and price the user approves. Google named more than 60 organisations collaborating on it (Google Cloud blog).
• Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), published by Stripe and OpenAI on 29 September 2025 under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its first use was Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, live at launch for US Etsy sellers, with Shopify merchants announced as the next group (Stripe blog).

Both protocols started with retail goods, not B2B subscriptions, so agents buying software licences on their own is still a forecast. The direction matters for software vendors anyway: an agent can only buy what it can read. A product whose plans, limits and terms live in a sales call or a PDF is invisible to that channel. A product with a public, structured description of what it does, what it costs and what the buyer receives can be compared and selected by a machine acting inside a mandate the user signed. It is the same distribution problem described above, moved one step closer to the payment.

#Summary

AI code generation means mediocre, copied software will flood the market. The defence is the same in every segment: understand the business you serve, build the barriers a clone cannot copy (operations, trust, data), and invest in distribution. To stay out of the mass of cheap copies, build relationships around the customer’s real needs and aim for the deeper parts of an industry, where established B2B relationships protect you from bots copying products for the general market. Mediocrity will not survive this shift. Products built on real relationships in well-chosen niches will.