Don’t Make AI Your SaaS Core — Keep It As Your Accelerator

As AI technologies continue to grow, more SaaS startups are integrating artificial intelligence into their products to enhance user experience. However, it’s important to remember that AI does not need to be the central element of every SaaS product, especially if you don’t own the full language model! A lot of startups are doing the same thing that you can already do on ChatGPT or Claude. That is creating wrappers around basic functionalities like text summarization or grammar checking. However, this could become problematic if ChatGPT goes down, as these services would rely on it to function properly. It could be a good idea as well though and you can integrate additional elements of your own like dashboards or reporting. You can do that quickly and at a low price on platforms like PagePalooza where you own the code, have no customization limits and pay a one time fee. You can also do it all yourself with restrictions and limited control on platforms like Bubble, WordPress and WIX. On Reddit, many discussions highlight the challenges faced by startups that heavily rely on AI, especially when services like ChatGPT experience downtime. For example, one post asked, “How is your startup product doing when ChatGPT is down?”. The Risks of Over-Reliance on AI One of the challenges with building a SaaS product around AI is that you’re placing a significant portion of your service on an external, sometimes unpredictable, service. For instance, OpenAI’s APIs, which power many of today’s AI-driven applications, can experience downtime, as we’ve seen in recent times. If your product is built around these APIs and they are down, your service will stop working. USE AI as an Assistant, Not the Core Value! A good example of using AI not as a wrapper is PagePalooza, a SaaS builder I recently launched and that helps users build and scale web applications. Using AI: The platform allows users to generate websites to start with and quickly have a base to build upon. This step helps users onboard quickly and not having to manually build a landing page to start with and build the core features on. Without Using AI: Incase of 3rd party AI servers going down, predefined themes that users can claim exist on PagePalooza. So users are directed there when AI is not available to create their landing pages and move forward with building their web applications. I use AI more as an assistant and not core value and which I think is the way to go rather than an entire wrapper. Conclusion AI can undoubtedly enhance your apps, but it’s essential not to place too much reliance on it. Building resilience through alternative features, such as predefined projects or manual workflows, ensures that your product can still deliver value when AI services are unavailable. By using AI as an assistant rather than the core value, SaaS startups can avoid potential disruptions while still taking advantage of the benefits that AI offers.