Agent-Built Clones Surge: SaaS Value May Shift from Software to Data
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-16
Software reverse-engineering and cloning are surging
More people are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents. Someone showcased a set of 10 open-source cloned apps whose original products are each worth over $5 billion. As software becomes this easy to copy, the industry is still grappling with the implications.
Value may shift from software to data
If software can be quickly rebuilt, what's truly worth buying in a traditional SaaS company may be its years of accumulated customer data and workflows — some SaaS companies are essentially data companies.
Past acquisitions of declining SaaS used 2x ARR, but the future may call for a new metric that better measures data value.
Related event: Agent-driven software cloning surges; SaaS value shifts from code to data(4 posts)→
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