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Essay

Software Is a Commodity Now. What That Means for SaaS Distribution

October 23, 20265 min read

Short answer: software in itself now has close to zero value, because AI makes building it cheap. The good news: the same thing made integrating cheap. What used to take a dev team months, your coding agent now does in an interview. Integrations went from a luxury to a distribution channel.

From the video:

Laziest Way to Get Paying Users to Your SaaS In 2026 on YouTube

Version 1.0: why nobody did this

I started doing these integrations early, before there was any platform for it. It wasn't easy.

  • Finding partners happened by chance. Finding them on purpose cost as much as finding clients. Finding two, three or four for a full scenario was basically impossible.
  • Negotiating and setting up each one was costly.
  • Maintaining them was worse. Software is never stationary: API keys break, things change.
  • The money: how much did they sell? How much is owed? Who handles the bug reports?

That last list is most of what SaaS integration maintenance is about, and it's why most integrations between small products never happened at all.

Version 2.0: two advances

  1. Artificial intelligence. Software is a commodity, so the effort of creating a widget and integrating one is close to zero. Before AI, it wasn't possible for a small team.
  2. Hosting platforms. Platforms that don't only host, but sell through their own marketplaces. That's what drags the barrier to entry down.

How fast it can go now: one of mine was live 24 hours after we agreed to collaborate.

The pattern

It happened before. Selling physical products online once needed capital or your own website; then Shopify and Amazon. Digital products got Whop. Widgets are next. (How to sell a SaaS feature as a widget is the practical version.)

What's left that's defensible

If anyone can build the software, the partner worth integrating with has something you can't cheaply rebuild: their network, their data, their rights, their expertise. That's the test in the three moats that decide whether a SaaS is worth integrating with, and it matters more now than it did when building was expensive.

Frequently asked questions

If software is a commodity, what's defensible?

What a partner can't cheaply rebuild: their network, their data, their rights, their expertise.

How long does an integration take now?

One of mine was live 24 hours after we agreed to collaborate.

Why weren't integrations between small SaaS products common before?

Because finding partners was luck, every deal was negotiated from scratch, the integration had to be built and maintained by hand, and nobody had a clean way to track who sold what and what was owed.

Ordana is the platform version of what I used to do by hand: list a feature as a widget, or integrate another startup's, with the terms set before anyone starts.

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