Missive #238 (Welcome to the machine).

Friends:

Yesterday I cancelled my $135/month Mailchimp subscription.

Because over the weekend, armed with AI (and several cups of coffee), I built my own replacement from scratch.

Just to be clear, what I built in a weekend is no threat to Mailchimp’s empire. But it does exactly what I need — manages several thousand subscribers, handles unsubscribe links with personalized URLs, and is fully compliant with CAN-SPAM and GDPR regulations on both sides of the Atlantic. Stack-wise: Python, SQLite, Docker, and Fly for a cloud VM. I’m calling it my Missive Machine, and I never could have pulled it off without my friend, Claude AI.

The SaaSpocalypse is coming! Maybe.

My little weekend project may be a small data point in a much larger story that is being talked about. The pundits have recently been predicting a “SaaSpocalypse” — the AI-driven collapse of SaaS giants like Salesforce, Atlassian, Adobe, Notion, and Shopify. These companies have spent two decades printing money through per-seat subscription models, and suddenly the economics are shifting under their feet.

I don’t think they’ll all be marginalized overnight. Some will adapt, and some won’t. But let’s look at the email SaaS platform landscape specifically, because maybe it’s a useful test case:

• Mailchimp will be fine. Sixty percent market share and the backing of Intuit creates a formidable moat.
• HubSpot is probably safe too. Email is just one feature in a broader revenue suite, and they’ve been genuinely aggressive about embedding AI throughout their platform.
• Buttondown is at real risk. They’ve built their brand around the techie, DIY crowd — which is precisely the demographic that will happily spend a weekend building their own solution instead of paying a subscription.
• MailerLite is in an uncomfortable position. Competing purely on price is never a durable strategy, and AI just made “free, custom-built” a real option for a wider slice of their customer base.
• Substack has something none of the others do: network effects. Publishing there gives you access to their distribution and discovery ecosystem — and that’s something AI can’t replicate with a weekend project.

What This Means for Your Startup

The pattern here is pretty clear. The platforms that survive will be the ones offering something beyond software functionality — distribution, integration depth, brand trust, or network effects. Pure-play feature delivery is increasingly vulnerable.

If you’re building a startup right now, that’s a lens worth using: What does my product offer that AI can’t easily commoditize? If the honest answer is “not much,” that’s worth thinking about.

As for me, I now have $135/month more to spend on tacos!

Welcome to my Missive Machine.

Have a great week, all.

-Bret