SaaS once looked immortal. Monthly recurring revenue, sticky contracts, and Wall Street-friendly predictability made it the darling of the 2000s and 2010s. But like every empire, SaaS carries within it the seeds of its own decline.
I’ve already argued this twice on Predatorialism: first in SaaS Is Dying — Here’s What Comes Next, where I traced the shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to usage-based pricing; and again in The Death of SaaS, the Rise of Tokens and the World AGI Will Eat, where I described how tokens and machine agents will tear through human-centric SaaS models.
Now it’s time to spell out the inevitable conclusion: the next era is liquid. SaaS subscriptions are dying, and streamed payments will consume them.
The Cracks in SaaS
SaaS subscriptions were supposed to align value with access. But they come with built-in distortions:
- You pay whether you use the software or not.
- You buy into arbitrary tiers that rarely fit your needs.
- You sign contracts to hedge uncertainty rather than embrace real-time value.
This mismatch was tolerable when software was scarce, onboarding was slow, and inertia kept churn low. In today’s modular, API-driven world, SaaS feels less like alignment and more like taxation.
The Rise of Liquid Payments
Liquid models collapse the billing interval. Instead of “pay per year” or “pay per month,” payment flows continuously, second by second, function by function.
This is not theoretical. Cloud compute already charges per request. AI APIs charge per token. Streaming money protocols — Superfluid, Sablier, LlamaPay — literally drip funds per second. Stablecoins make it global, permissionless, and programmable.
Liquid payments create perfect symmetry:
- Use more, pay more.
- Stop using, stop paying.
- No upfront negotiation, no bloated tiers, no exit penalties.
Software becomes infrastructure. Consumption and value merge into a single flow.
Why Streams Eat SaaS
Liquid payments are not just an efficiency tweak. They are a predator — the next species that makes the old one obsolete.
- Value = Cost, in Real Time. No more paying for slack capacity. No more artificial floors.
- Frictionless Adoption. The barrier to trying software collapses. If it delivers value, the stream grows.
- Continuous Incentives. Vendors must earn revenue every moment, not just when contracts renew.
- Agent-Native. As I argued in The Death of SaaS, the Rise of Tokens, humans tolerate subscriptions. Machines don’t. AI agents want APIs and flows, not “plans.”
- Token Rails. Tokens don’t just move money. They define entitlements, permissions, and governance. Streaming tokens mean access and billing merge into one programmable layer.
This is what it looks like when business models get rewritten by machines.
The Business Consequences
For builders:
- Billing becomes core architecture. If you can’t meter it atomically, you can’t stream it.
- Retention shifts. Customers aren’t lost in “churn events.” They’re lost the instant usage stops.
- Focus shifts. Lock-ins die; continuous value delivery wins.
For enterprises:
- Procurement evaporates. No more vendor onboarding gauntlets for a 12-month license. An agent can start streaming cents per minute instantly.
- Financial planning changes. Instead of fixed subscription outflows, costs track real-time usage, like electricity.
For the ecosystem:
- Platforms that control streams become new predators. Just as Salesforce once defined the SaaS model, the protocols that own streamed payments will own the rails of the liquid era.
From SaaS to Streams: A New Manifesto
- SaaS was a midpoint, not an endpoint.
- The continuum is clear: license → subscription → usage → stream.
- Tokens and agents aren’t just add-ons; they are the native consumers of liquid payments.
- The predator isn’t another SaaS unicorn. It’s the inevitability of software as flow.
Closing the Loop
SaaS isn’t dead because software is less valuable. It’s dead because software has become too valuable to be trapped in rigid subscriptions.
The world ahead is not Software-as-a-Service. It’s Software-as-a-Stream & Service-as-a-Stream.
And once you experience software this way, you won’t go back.
