--- title: "The Vibe Coding Value Shift" author: "Daniel Gorld" author_role: "Consulting Director, cbs CX — The cbs Group Salesforce Consultancy" author_url: "https://cx-waves.com/about" publisher: "CX-Waves" canonical_url: "https://cx-waves.com/nodes/vibe-coding-value-shift" date_published: 2026-06-01 date_modified: 2026-09-20 language: en --- # The Vibe Coding Value Shift Source: Daniel Gorld, CX-Waves — https://cx-waves.com/nodes/vibe-coding-value-shift (published 2026-06-01, updated 2026-09-20) ## How does AI-driven development (Vibe Coding) change the economic value of enterprise software? * **Lowers Development Costs:** Vibe Coding drastically reduces the time and resources required to create software applications, making development significantly cheaper and faster. * **Undermines SaaS Pricing:** The traditional SaaS model, based on amortizing expensive development, faces pressure as custom solutions become viable alternatives to subscription services. * **Shifts Value to Expertise:** The true value shifts from the software code itself to human expertise in process knowledge, integration complexity, and strategic judgment. * **Empowers In-House Building:** Companies gain the capability to build internal applications and features that once required external vendors, leading to a re-evaluation of software purchases. ## The Value of Software Was Never the Software Itself For an extended period, companies paid for software due to its inherent scarcity. The difficulty in finding developers and the high cost of development meant that specialized solutions necessitated either purchasing an existing product or investing heavily in custom creation. This principle of scarcity underpinned the entire SaaS business model. Software vendors could offer neatly packaged features on a subscription basis, and customers would pay because the alternative of building it themselves was demonstrably more expensive. The payment was for the avoidance of greater cost, not primarily for the intrinsic value of the software itself. Vibe Coding fundamentally disrupts this scarcity-based model. When a standard software function can be developed in a matter of hours instead of months, the financial justification for many SaaS products diminishes significantly. Decision-makers increasingly struggle to justify subscribing to software that their organization could effectively build in-house within a short timeframe. ## The SaaS Pricing Model Is Under Pressure The traditional economic model for many software vendors assumed that expensive development costs would be spread across a large customer base through subscriptions. This model was considered fair and sustainable as long as software development remained genuinely costly. The landscape is now undergoing a radical transformation as the cost side of this equation changes. AI-assisted development has the potential to reduce software production costs by factors of 10 or even 100. This drastic reduction raises a critical question: who ultimately benefits from these newfound efficiencies—the vendor or the customer? Currently, the benefits largely accrue to vendors, as subscription prices have not decreased despite lower development costs. In fact, many platforms are increasing prices, often by marketing new AI-powered features as premium tiers. However, this trend is unsustainable. As companies, particularly their IT departments, grasp the full capabilities introduced by Vibe Coding, they will inevitably begin to question the necessity of their current subscription expenditures. ## What Remains Genuinely Valuable? This shift represents a pivotal change, impacting not only software vendors but also consulting firms, IT service providers, and internal IT departments. As the production of software becomes increasingly straightforward, the focus of value transitions to areas that are inherently more complex and less automatable. ### Process knowledge Understanding which business processes are suitable for digitization, and critically, how best to implement that digitization, is a capability that cannot be automated. While AI can generate code, it lacks the strategic insight to determine if a company should standardize its quoting process or if that process represents a core competitive differentiator that should be preserved in its unique form. This strategic judgment regarding process optimization remains a human domain. ### Integration expertise The ability to create a functional application in a few hours is distinct from the challenge of seamlessly integrating that application. Integration requires deep understanding of an existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) landscape, intricate data structures, and complex regulatory compliance requirements. The competence in understanding and managing systems and the depth of integration knowledge become more, not less, crucial in this new paradigm. ### Judgment Companies face a critical strategic decision regarding what to build internally versus what to purchase externally. Distinguishing between custom development that offers strategic advantages and development that merely introduces new technical debt requires significant experience, contextual understanding, and independent assessment. Software has always been a means to an end, a vehicle. The actual product or value has consistently been the efficient and effective process it enables. ## What Does This Mean for Decision-Makers Today? The implications of Vibe Coding are not merely theoretical; they have direct budget and strategic consequences for organizations. For CIOs and project leads in B2B industrial companies, this necessitates a fundamental rethinking of their software purchasing decisions. The primary question should evolve beyond "What does this solution cost?" to include: "Could we, today, build this solution—or significant parts of it—ourselves? And if so, what exactly are we gaining by buying it externally?" This perspective does not advocate for a universal abandonment of SaaS solutions. Platforms that offer genuine depth, such as robust data models, stable APIs, comprehensive regulatory compliance, and global scalability, will retain substantial value. Their value proposition lies in their platform maturity and extensive capabilities, rather than in a handful of features that an AI-driven system could replicate internally in a single afternoon. Decision-makers should now critically examine several areas within their organizations. They need to identify which active software subscriptions cover functions that could be developed in-house with reasonable effort in the current environment. Furthermore, it's important to pinpoint where the company is paying for unnecessary complexity, especially when AI can now simplify many of these tasks. Organizations must also assess which processes are so business-critical or unique that they warrant taking on the risk of in-house development. The most challenging, yet crucial, question is identifying who within the organization possesses the necessary process knowledge to accurately answer these strategic inquiries. Vibe Coding represents a fundamental shift in the economics of software, not a fleeting trend. Organizations that disregard this shift risk continuing to pay for external subscriptions in the future for solutions that competitors or more agile companies are already building themselves. Conversely, those who grasp this transformation have a significant opportunity to reallocate software budgets towards enhancing process competence, thereby creating a sustainable and genuine competitive advantage.