levelsio tells software founders to buy Big Tech stock instead
A joke from Jack Ellis about clones of clones turned into an argument over whether small software still has margins.
Jack Ellis posted a joke about the clone chain in software. Someone clones Beehiv because they think it is too expensive, then someone clones that person's SaaS for the same reason, then someone else clones the new product and releases it for free. His words were that he cannot stop laughing.
Someone on here clones Beehiv because they think it’s too expensive but then someone else clones that person’s SaaS because they think it’s too expensive.
levelsio did not treat it as a joke. He replied that if you understand basic economics, the only winners here are Big AI and Big Tech, and that it is a race to the bottom for everyone else in software. His advice was to become a co-owner of Big AI and Big Tech stock and survive off their dividends or stock appreciation.
The pile-on
Marc Lou, in a separate post, wrote three words. "SaaS is so dead." He is the founder who priced MailCheap at $19 against beehiiv's $109 Lite tier, which we covered earlier, so he has been on the undercutting side of exactly the chain Ellis described.
Dan Kulkov posted in the other direction the same stretch, saying his new SaaS made $1,000 in one day. One screenshot, no churn figure, no month two. That is the shape of most of the evidence on both sides of this argument right now.
The business read
Nobody in this exchange posted the numbers that would settle it. The race to the bottom claim needs retention and pricing data over time, and none of the four posts has any. What you actually have is one founder's economic read, one founder's one-liner, one founder's joke and one founder's first-day screenshot.
What is worth sitting with is the asymmetry levelsio is pointing at. Every link in the clone chain pays the same model providers and the same cloud bills, and the price the end customer pays keeps falling while the input costs sit with a small number of companies. If that holds, the margin does not vanish, it moves upstream. His conclusion, owning the stock rather than fighting the price war, is the part worth arguing with, because it assumes the small operator cannot find a position the clones do not reach.
The counterexample is sitting in the same feed. Kulkov's $1,000 day says something is still converting at the small end. Whether it is still there in six months is the question nobody has answered publicly yet.
It's a race to the bottom for anyone else in software
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