Welcome to the Era of Personalized Software
SaaS is dead. Long live SaaS. Software is following the arc every other craft followed before it: bespoke, then mass-produced, then bespoke again. This time the tailor is you.
SaaS is dead. Long live SaaS.
The French used this phrase for the succession of kings. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! The old monarch dies, the institution endures. The form survives. The substance changes. I’ve been turning this over for weeks because it captures something I can’t say more precisely. The way software gets built, distributed, and owned is going through a succession of its own.
01 // The Tailor
There is something about going to a tailor. Not the luxury of it, the precision. They measure you. Not the average of a thousand bodies and shapes that came before. The suit fits because it was made for your shoulders and the way you stand. Nobody else’s.
I recently started building a bookmarking tool for myself, by myself. I’m a proponent of data governance and sovereignty. Your data should live where you decide it lives, not where it’s convenient for someone else’s business model. I used Pocket for years, right up until Mozilla let it die. Tried Raindrop after that. Neither met my criteria. Not because they’re bad products. They’re genuinely good products. For the general case. For 80, maybe 90 percent of what bookmarking needs to be.
But I live in the other 10 percent. My ideas and personal beliefs matter to me, and they seep into software too.
So I built it. Bookmarks stored in your own AT Protocol repository. Zero-knowledge encryption for the private ones. Your data in your repo, not in someone else’s database. If I, the builder, go rogue tomorrow, shut everything down, pivot to selling crypto, it doesn’t matter. Your data stays exactly where it is. Under your keys. Portable to any client that speaks the same protocol. That’s the difference between building on a platform and building on a protocol. The platform can hold you hostage. The protocol can’t.
What struck me wasn’t whether I could build it. It was a different question. Why hadn’t I done this before?
The protocols existed. The tools existed. The answer was disarmingly simple. The cost of building something bespoke had never been this low. The friction that used to make just build it yourself a punchline reserved for weeklong hackathons had quietly evaporated.
02 // The Factory
The object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.
How did we get here? The same way we always do. Through economies of scale. Ironically, capitalism enabled it.
SaaS was the industrialization of software. Just as the factory replaced the workshop, subscription software replaced the custom-built tool. And for what it’s worth, it was good. It worked. Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Jira. These products democratized capabilities that used to require dedicated engineering teams and six-figure budgets. A startup could materialize over a weekend on a stack of SaaS products and a credit card.
But something happened along the way.
Marx described four forms of alienation in industrial labor. Two of them map onto our relationship with SaaS with uncomfortable precision. He wrote that in 1844, about textile mills and iron foundries. Swap factory for platform and worker for user and the diagnosis reads like it was written last Tuesday.
First, you are alienated from the product of your labor. Your bookmarks live in Pocket’s database. Your documents in Google’s cloud. Your projects in Jira’s servers. You create, you organize, you curate, and none of it is yours. You spend years building a knowledge base in Notion. Thousands of pages, carefully organized, deeply interlinked. That’s your externalized thinking. Your second brain, as the productivity crowd likes to call it. And it lives at the mercy of a company you have no relationship with beyond a monthly charge on your credit card. If the service shuts down, pivots, gets acquired, or decides to change its API, your work is collateral.
Second, you are alienated from the process of your labor. You don’t shape the tool to match your thinking. You reshape your thinking to match the tool. You learn to organize in Notion’s blocks. You learn to plan in Jira’s sprints. You learn to communicate in Slack’s threads. Slowly, imperceptibly, the tool molds the user.
Walter Benjamin saw the same dynamic in art, decades before software existed.
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
He called it aura. The internet has recently rediscovered the word. Aura is everywhere now, a meme, a vibe, something you farm in video games and measure on TikTok. Benjamin meant something deeper. The quality of uniqueness and authenticity that belongs to the original and vanishes in reproduction. A painting has aura. A print does not.
SaaS stripped software of its aura. Every Notion workspace looks the same. Every Trello board. Every Slack channel. The templates differ, the accent colors change, but the container is identical. You’re working inside someone else’s architecture, decorated to feel like yours.
Generic works. It genuinely does. For the vast majority of what you need, the off-the-rack suit is fine. But the remaining 10-20%? That’s where your actual thinking lives. Where your workflow has those odd edges, those specific needs that no product manager at a SaaS company will ever prioritize, because they serve a market of one.
You.
03 // The Return
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And this particular rhyme is loud.
Made for one. By hand, by name, by need.
Made for everyone. Cheap, fast, good enough.
Made for one, again. But with the economics of scale.
Before industrialization, everything was bespoke. The cobbler made your shoes. The carpenter built your table. The tailor cut your cloth. Each item carried the fingerprint of its maker and was shaped for its owner. Then the factory came. Scale won. Cost collapsed. Quality became good enough. The individual yielded to the average.
But look around. Farm-to-table restaurants. Made-to-measure clothing ordered online. Custom furniture making a comeback. Domain after domain, the same pendulum. Bespoke, then mass-produced, then bespoke again. Not regression. Synthesis. The third era carries the economics of the second with the intimacy of the first.
Software is following the exact same arc. And AI is the loom.
The desire isn’t new. The impulse to own your tools is as old as toolmaking. What’s new is that building something tailored to your exact needs no longer takes six months and a team of engineers. The barrier didn’t lower gradually. It collapsed.
A complex system that has artificially suppressed volatility tends to become extremely fragile.
Taleb would recognize the structural risk of the world we built. When everyone depends on the same five SaaS products, you have a monoculture. Efficient, yes. But fragile in ways we’ve learned to ignore. When Notion goes down, millions freeze. When Figma has an outage, design teams across the globe stop. The same consolidation that made these platforms powerful made them single points of failure.
A world of personally-built tools is antifragile by nature. Not because each individual tool is better. It might be rougher, missing features you never needed anyway. But the ecosystem is diverse. Failure stays local. It doesn’t cascade.
04 // The Erosion
Right now, developers are uniquely positioned. We have the context, the instincts, the familiarity with the tools making this possible. We’re the early adopters of our own quiet revolution.
But this window is temporary.
The distinction that matters is between micro and macro complexity. Distributed systems, cryptography, real-time collaboration at scale. These remain hard. They require deep knowledge and will for the foreseeable future. But the floor is rising. What anyone can build with natural language, AI assistants, and increasingly sophisticated abstractions is moving up at a pace even the most optimistic predictions from five years ago didn’t anticipate.
What takes a developer a weekend today will take a non-developer a weekend tomorrow. And then an evening. And then an afternoon. The tools don’t care about your credentials. They care about your intent.
The question used to be can you code? It’s becoming what do you want to build? The barrier isn’t technical skill anymore. It’s imagination and taste.
Habits are hard to break. The inertia of good enough is powerful. People will keep using Notion, keep filing Jira tickets, keep storing bookmarks in someone else’s database. For a while. But once the process starts, it’s natural. Like erosion. Water finds the cracks. Each small departure widens the gap between what generic software offers and what you know is possible. A personal script here, a custom dashboard there, a tool that does exactly one thing exactly right.
Until the whole cliff comes rushing down into the sea, making waves and changes along the way.
Benjamin worried about what we lose when everything is reproduced. Marx, about what we lose when we don’t own what we make. Taleb, about what happens when everything depends on the same fragile systems.
Perhaps the era of personalized software answers all three. Or perhaps it just asks the same questions in a language we haven’t fully learned to speak yet.
When building exactly what you need costs almost nothing, what does it mean to keep settling for something that almost fits?
We’ve been wearing off-the-rack software for two decades. Some of us are starting to remember what a tailor feels like.
Further Reading
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts by Karl Marx
Marx's 1844 exploration of alienation in labor, and how workers become estranged from the products they create and the processes they inhabit.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
Benjamin's 1935 essay on how mass reproduction strips art of its aura, its unique presence and authenticity.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb's 2012 argument that systems benefit from volatility, while artificially suppressed complexity breeds catastrophic fragility.
AT Protocol
The decentralized social networking protocol that enables data ownership. Your content in your repository, portable across any service.