Eric Siu breaks down why SaaS companies like Canva, Atlassian, and Salesforce are moving AI features behind paywalls. Rising inference costs are forcing them to cut free tiers and rethink pricing, creating what some call a SaaSpocalypse for the industry.
They're making it now where what my understanding is that a lot of the free seats are going away. And so they're starting to charge. They're starting to— when they start to clamp down on these areas to drive growth, that is a little bit of a negative signal because what the parties over in these areas, right? I will also say, this is a different company, Canva. Canva allow you to design flyers and things like that, quick designs, right? What they reported, I believe their CEO, Melanie Perkins. So they have these There's a lot of pressures, headwinds now. So their AI inference costs are going up a lot, and that's actually slashing the revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% or so, right? So the thing is, there are a lot of the cool AI features, they can't give it away for free. It has to be for the paid users. The question now is, how is a company like Canva going to adapt? And when you look at Atlassian, they're trying to charge for a lot of these things that used to be free. Like, are they just trying to squeeze as much as they can, right? I look at these 2 companies as a little different than Like a, I don't know, like a Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, where you still have the agents doing a lot of these API calls to the CRM, right? Salesforce, they own Slack too. A lot of people are using Slack. And so I don't think they're quite out of the woods yet, I would say, with the SaaSpocalypse stuff.
