{"id":42754,"date":"2026-06-20T07:02:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maccelerator.la\/?p=42754"},"modified":"2026-06-20T07:02:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:02:18","slug":"the-commoditization-of-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maccelerator.la\/en\/blog\/startup-strategy\/the-commoditization-of-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Software Is a Commodity Now. Here’s What Actually Holds Value."},"content":{"rendered":"

A feature that took your team two quarters to ship just got replicated by a competitor in a weekend. Then a customer asked the question that keeps post-PMF founders awake: “Why am I paying you when an AI can just build this?” The commoditization of software is the process by which software capabilities become cheap, abundant, and undifferentiated, so the code itself no longer commands a price premium.<\/strong> It matters right now because AI code generation has collapsed the cost of building features that used to take months down to days.<\/p>\n

Across the 500+ founders we’ve worked with in 30 countries, the recurring question has shifted. It used to be “how do we build it?” Now it’s “why would anyone pay for it?”<\/p>\n

That shift is not a mood. It is structural. And if your pricing and differentiation rest on the product roadmap, the ground is already moving under you. This piece gives you a lens to see where value is migrating \u2014 and where it is not.<\/p>\n

Why Software Commoditization Hit a Tipping Point in 2024-2025<\/h2>\n

This is not a five-year-out problem. Three forces compounded at once, and the result is permanent.<\/p>\n

First, AI code generation pushed the marginal cost of a feature toward zero.<\/strong> What required a senior engineer and a quarter now takes a prompt and an afternoon. The build moat \u2014 the thing many founders quietly relied on \u2014 evaporated.<\/p>\n

Second, open-source and API-first infrastructure mean nobody builds from scratch anymore. Authentication, payments, search, vector storage, model access \u2014 all assembled, not invented. When everyone starts from the same Lego set, the structures look the same.<\/p>\n

Third, buyers have more substitutes than ever. Funded competitors per category have multiplied. Switching costs dropped. Software buyer churn pressure is well-documented across SaaS benchmarks, and it gets worse as parity products flood every niche.<\/p>\n

Here is the part most founders miss. When the layer below you gets cheap, value does not disappear \u2014 it migrates up. It moves toward distribution, trust, outcomes, and relationships.<\/p>\n

“Commoditization is not the death of value. It is the relocation of value. The founders who panic are the ones still standing on the layer that’s becoming free.” \u2014 Alessandro Marianantoni<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This applies far beyond SaaS. A services business whose deliverables are now AI-assisted. A marketplace whose matching logic is replicable. A consumer app whose features are copyable in a sprint. Same migration, different surface.<\/p>\n

Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n