Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS.

Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system.

Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore.

Now with agentic code, instead of "buy splunk" or "buy jira" or whatever thing they are trying to do, they have one of those "teens now in their mid twenties" that are SUPER excited about Agentic flows, either write an agentic tool or simply use an agentic tool to code up the 300 lines of code that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk or whatever. Since most people only use 5% of the total features of any product, there's no reason to buy tools anymore, just build it for a fraction of the cost.

I don't know if the above is where we're at right now, but it's coming.