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.

36 points | by stanislavb 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • smolgumball 24 minutes ago
    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 1 hour ago
    > 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".

  • benoau 1 hour ago
    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.

  • ibn_khaldun 47 minutes ago
    Software is in its SoundCloud rap era.
  • snarky-comments 1 hour ago
    This could signal a healthy fail fast competitive market. Maybe?
    • archargelod 22 minutes ago
      Fail fast, with no one succeeding is not healthy.

      One vibe-coded app is no better than other, or if it's better - not for long. So why would anyone invest in product that is going to be superseded in a few months/weeks/days?

  • pianopatrick 42 minutes ago
    Now that barriers to entry are going down, I think software will become a hit and fad driven industry similar to movies, music and video games.
    • manmal 37 minutes ago
      Certainly not for infrastructure.
      • pianopatrick 33 minutes ago
        Arguably there have been fads for infrastructure, just on a longer time scale.
  • jfdi 50 minutes ago
    Interesting, thanks for posting