By Juergen Hoebarth | Predatorialism
I. SaaS Was the Final Human Interface
For two decades, SaaS ruled the software world.
It turned one-time products into endless streams of predictable revenue. Every company sold subscriptions to human users—clicks, dashboards, and monthly payments wrapped in convenience.
But AI doesn’t subscribe.
Agents don’t log in. They don’t wait for invoices or renewal cycles. They act, transact, and move value in real time.
The interface era is ending.
The transaction era is beginning.
II. The New Stack: MCP + x402
Two quiet standards are forming the backbone of a new economic layer.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) turns every tool into a callable function. It standardizes how agents discover, authenticate, and use external capabilities—essentially the universal adapter for machine-to-machine collaboration.
x402 resurrects an old HTTP status code: 402 Payment Required.
When an API requires payment, it responds with a 402 containing the price, asset, and wallet address. The agent pays on-chain—often in USDC—and retries. Access is unlocked instantly.
Together, they create something profound: the first programmable payment loop between machines.
A logic layer for work.
A trust layer for value.
III. The Fall of Subscriptions
The subscription model was built for human inertia.
It made sense when usage was predictable and friction high. But agents don’t need predictability—they need liquidity.
Why commit to $49 a month when a task can cost $0.0003, paid instantly upon execution?
SaaS was about access.
Agentic commerce is about exchange.
- Billing happens per action.
- Access is permissionless.
- Trust is verified on-chain.
This shift unbundles software into micro-services with transparent, real-time pricing.
Software stops being “a company.” It becomes a marketplace.
IV. The Rise of the Machine Economy
When agents can pay other agents, entire value chains start to self-organize.
A research agent pays a data oracle for analysis.
The oracle pays a compute agent for processing.
A compliance agent verifies the transaction.
Every participant earns, spends, and rebalances automatically.
Value flows like electricity—measured, priced, and settled continuously.
This is not “automation.” It’s economic autonomy.
Software that runs itself.
And pays for itself.
V. The New Predators
The next generation of dominant companies won’t sell SaaS—they’ll build the rails beneath it.
| Layer | Description | Dominant Species |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol | Defines how agents talk, pay, and verify | Foundations (Coinbase, Cloudflare, Anthropic) |
| Infrastructure | Wallets, compliance, pricing oracles | “Stripe for Agents” startups |
| Marketplace | Discovery and aggregation | “Zapier for AI” ecosystems |
| Application | Autonomous agents specialized in execution | The new SaaS—micro, modular, monetized per call |
Each layer feeds on the inefficiencies of the one above it.
Predation becomes protocol.
VI. The End of “Seats”
You can’t sell a seat to a machine.
Agents don’t occupy user slots—they execute functions.
Revenue will be measured in actions, not licenses.
Churn will be replaced by velocity.
The agent doesn’t care about your UI—it cares about latency, accuracy, and cost per result.
The entire SaaS vocabulary—ARR, MRR, retention—is about to collapse into one number:
profit per action.
VII. From SaaS to Self-Liquidating Software
In this new model, every transaction contains both the output and its payment.
No invoicing, no billing ops, no receivables.
Revenue clears the instant work is done.
Software becomes self-liquidating.
It sustains itself with each call, like a living organism feeding on its own utility.
Accounting, delivery, and settlement merge into a single atomic operation.
The CFO becomes a smart contract.
VIII. The Opportunity
Several billion-dollar primitives are waiting to be built:
- Billing Infrastructure — A plug-and-play toolkit for developers to expose x402 endpoints, track usage, and price dynamically.
- Agent Wallets — Smart, policy-based wallets for autonomous systems.
- Compliance Kernels — Gateways that check regulatory and ESG parameters before execution.
- Agent Marketplaces — Discovery layers where agents buy and sell capabilities with no human involvement.
The companies that master these rails won’t just serve the AI economy.
They’ll own it.
IX. No More Free Trials
SaaS gamified human psychology—discounts, trials, upsells.
Agentic commerce is pure logic. It optimizes for efficiency, not persuasion.
An agent doesn’t need a free trial.
It needs a verified output at the right price.
When every function can price itself, only one metric matters:
truth per token.
Epilogue
The subscription dies.
The agent pays.
Software evolves into a living market of micro-intent and instant settlement.
SaaS was built for humans.
Agentic commerce is built for machines.
And in that transition, the very concept of “business model” becomes code.
Predatorialism lives here.
