Why Most SaaS Companies Will Be Dead in the Coming Years—and Why First-Party Agent Ecosystems Win
The SaaS industry has been the backbone of modern software for over a decade. But we’re approaching an inflection point where the traditional SaaS model will struggle to survive—and it all comes down to one thing: agents.
In the coming years, most SaaS companies will be dead. Not because they lack innovation or market fit, but because agents perform fundamentally better with first-party (1P) services. When you control your own ecosystem, agents can navigate it seamlessly, understand its nuances, and provide a superior experience to end users.
This is exactly what we’re experiencing at JustCopy.
Why First-Party Wins
At JustCopy, we made a strategic decision: instead of relying on third-party services like Vercel or Render.com for deployment and hosting, we’re building our own first-party deployment and hosting infrastructure—similar to what Netlify and Render offer, but tailored specifically for our ecosystem.
Now, will our solution be as polished as Vercel or Render.com from day one? Of course not. These are mature, battle-tested platforms. But here’s the critical insight: agents perform significantly better on first-party infrastructure versus using third-party services.
Why?
Deep Ecosystem Knowledge: Our agents understand every detail of our deployment system. They know the file structures, the configuration patterns, the edge cases. This deep familiarity allows them to work more efficiently and intelligently.
Better User Experience: Because agents can navigate our ecosystem without translation layers or API limitations, they can provide faster, more accurate responses to user needs.
Greater Recovery Capability: When things go wrong (and they will), our agents can do more to fix issues. They’re not limited by third-party API constraints or black-box systems. If something goes south, they can dive deep, diagnose the problem, and implement fixes that wouldn’t be possible with external dependencies.
The Third-Party Trap
Most SaaS companies today are built on a foundation of third-party services. It makes sense—why reinvent the wheel when great tools already exist? But this creates a fundamental limitation for AI agents.
When your agent needs to deploy code using Vercel’s API, it’s working through abstractions. When it encounters an error on Render.com, it can only work within the constraints of that platform’s interface. The agent becomes a user, not a native operator.
With first-party infrastructure, the agent IS the infrastructure. It’s not interfacing with your deployment system—it IS your deployment system. This shift from external user to internal operator is the difference between mediocre AI assistance and truly transformative AI capabilities.
The Path Forward
We’re not suggesting every company needs to rebuild everything from scratch. But companies that want to survive in an agent-first world need to start thinking differently:
• Identify core workflows where agent performance matters most
• Build first-party solutions for those critical paths
• Accept that your 1P solutions won’t be perfect initially
• Trust that agent performance gains will compound over time
At JustCopy, we’re betting our future on this thesis. We believe that as AI agents become more sophisticated, the companies that own their ecosystems will provide exponentially better experiences than those cobbling together third-party tools.
The SaaS companies that will thrive in the coming years won’t be the ones with the most features or the slickest UIs. They’ll be the ones that agents can truly master—and that means first-party ecosystems built from the ground up with AI agents in mind.
The era of third-party dependency is ending. The age of first-party agent ecosystems has begun.