Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y
The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard That's a huge drop. And, it matches my "human" observations. A lot of products are being vibe coded, released, and soon after that abandoned. 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. Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free. Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening product lifespan to continue even further down. Or maybe, at some point people will realised that there are no users for their products as every user can "build" their own and custom product. Leaving us with a dozen huge platforms that host and help you build those apps. Until then - it's a crazy gold rush and a lot of makers are abandoning their empty buckets.
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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.
> 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".
Death of the sunk-cost fallacy, you launch a thing and nobody gives a shit especially you yourself. However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.
The idea that users "make their own tool with AI" is a nerd fantasy that does not exist in the real world. Some use cases get absorbed into products like ChatGPT because Jim no longer needs a special web-based tool/calculator/product and can just ask ChatGPT to do it for him. But normies can't and don't want to build or maintain products. They wouldn't even have the patience to write the prompt to ask the AI to build it for them. Vibe-coders are mainly wannabe programmers and nerd hobbyists.
Software is in its SoundCloud rap era.