Median product lifespan has collapsed from 4 years to 1.5 years
Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y
SaaSHub's product graveyard, which tracks the status of hundreds of thousands of products, shows median lifespan hovering around four years for a long time before a sharp 2026 decline to about 1.5 years. The author attributes this to software becoming so cheap to produce that many products are vibe coded, released, and quickly abandoned once makers discover they lack viable customers or distribution.
It's become too cheap to produce software. So, a lot of people have been experimenting for 'free' with their ideas - only to find out that they weren't viable... or that they couldn't bring customers in.
- featwanz
I find myself pushed to develop tools of my own because even market incumbents can't meet my niche use cases for certain things.
In the same vein, I am trying not to feel dismayed as I venture into the SaaS landscape in a bid to decouple myself from employment and you cannot help but feel your product is doomed before it even launches given people can build their own solutions.
You just need to remember, not everyone is as technical as the people here and those individuals still require solutions to problems.
It's tiring hearing people say "oh well I'll just build it instead" yeah but is it maintainable? Does it scale? Do you know how your data is handled and saved?
- smolgumball
Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
- anonymous908213
> Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free.
Nothing about this statistic supports this claim. Maybe, actually, features aren't free, and even with a glamorous HN marketing blitz, nobody wants to use the dogshit software LLMs produce. Everyone can build "features" for free, if "features" is an alias for "a pile of 100 bugs with some makeup on it to make it look like a feature if you squint at it from a distance".