This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 7th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
AI companies like Sweden’s Lovable have rattled the entire software industry. Established companies are now crashing on the stock market as the sector faces a minor revolution. But some are sitting more securely than ever.
They are calling it the SaaSocalypse.
American software companies are going through an ordeal that is only accelerating — over the past month they have fallen more than 21 percent. Over the past year, value equivalent to 60 percent of the Stockholm Stock Exchange has gone up in smoke, and the entire industry is trembling. The reason is easy to spell: AI.
SaaS is an abbreviation standing for software as a service, which in essence means software paid for by subscription. The category has for several years provided the infrastructure for many companies. Everything from communication services to analytics systems is paid for monthly. The logic is that it is cheaper and better to buy a service than to have to build all these products yourself.
That hypothesis is now being questioned by the market. An entire industry is being shaken to its foundations.
The reason is how quickly AI services can now program without human involvement. AI company Anthropic’s product Claude Code has broken through rapidly, and means that much of the programming now happens automatically. Swedish Lovable is in a similar category, where you write what you want the service to build — and no knowledge of code is required.
If it quickly becomes possible to build your own services automatically, who will want to pay expensive licences from all these software companies?
The technology is fascinating and moving incredibly fast, but there are signs that the market is a little too eager in this case. Two things need to be kept in mind simultaneously.
The first is that the software customers buy serves several purposes. It performs a certain task — managing email and calendar, for example — which has a practical function. That part you can now perhaps program yourself, with the help of these new AI services.
But what software companies primarily deliver is the assurance that everything works. You can take services like Outlook and Gmail for granted. Coding your own email client is admittedly easier than it has ever been. But when it stops working on a Monday morning — who do you call? And who bears the cost of the company standing still when communication breaks down?
The licences you pay can be thought of as a kind of insurance product. Someone else will make sure it works smoothly, and that is worth money.
This leads us to the second point: the inevitable price pressure that this phenomenon will create. Software companies have swollen enormously with large departments for product development, marketing, and sales. The American company Adobe — which makes software including Photoshop and Acrobat — has over 30,000 employees. That is expensive to maintain.
A common scenario is that customers pay for software but then only use a small portion of it. In such situations, it can pay to build a considerably smaller — and above all cheaper — alternative. To meet this threat, new, lower pricing models will emerge at the software companies. Which leads to price pressure across the whole industry.
The winners in this scenario look set to be those sitting on the most sensitive and business-critical systems — the ones no one dares take any risk with at all. Large enterprise systems like German SAP are therefore sitting reasonably secure, as no CEO will dare replace one with a home-built alternative any time soon.
The losers are those who have pushed up prices for services that are good, but not vital. Here prices will fall — and redundancies will follow. You cannot maintain the same number of staff when this phenomenon starts spreading among customers. That is what the stock market is reacting to right now.
Previously, software companies competed with each other. Going forward, they will compete with customers building their own services for almost nothing at all. A completely new phenomenon that the industry has never had to contend with before.
And quite likely its greatest challenge ever.
