Twitter/X

@swyx says his team is being asked to pay >$40k/year for an enterprise SaaS they…

2026-08-07 · 00:05 UTC ·@swyx ·1 min read

Brief

@swyx says his team faces a proposed >$40k/year enterprise SaaS purchase they haven't used and can't customize, then proposes a repeatable remote hackathon to 'kill' such SaaS: $1,000 in tokens per team, weekend cloning challenge, $10,000 prize plus @latentspacepod writeup, open-source code, and iterative tests across SMB SaaS to map what’s hard to replicate.

Why it matters

@swyx says his team is being asked to pay >$40k/year for an enterprise SaaS they have never used and cannot customize, which he calls a shitty outcome for a small-business owner (post 2026-08-07).

Key details

  • He proposes a repeatable remote hackathon: he will fund $1,000 in tokens per team to clone a target SaaS in a weekend; the winning team gets $10,000 cash plus a @latentspacepod writeup, all code will be open sourced, and he plans to iterate on SMB-targeted SaaS to find what’s hard to kill quickly.
Source evidence

eval competition idea: Help kill my SaaS

my team is proposing to pay >$40k/year for enterprise saas we have never used and will never be able to customize.

as a smol business owner, this feels shitty.

thinking of doing a small remote hackathon:
- i cover $1000 in tokens for you
- you do your best to clone this SaaS in a weekend
- my team (your prospective customer) evals it
- winner gets $10,000 cash & @latentspacepod writeup
- all code is open sourced

everyone wins except high margin low moat saas.
we keep doing this with increasingly ambitious saas things for SMBs until we find the boundary of what saas is still hard to kill in a weekend.

does that work?