Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Ding: Enterprise SaaS sales are harder because building in-house is cheap

Shensi Ding · "We Don't Trust Agents" - What This CTO Knows That You Don't · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jun 1, 2026 · at 41:43

Shensi Ding, CEO of Merge, explains to host Molly O'Shea how AI coding tools are reducing pricing and renewal leverage for traditional enterprise SaaS vendors.

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“I mean, I think enterprise sales for these large companies is much harder because the time to build the same exact product in house is just significantly lower. There's also just less leverage. Like when you're doing a negotiation against the customer for why they should renew. Yeah. Like you can always just like, oh, I could just build this. And before that, that meant a very different cost, but now the cost for doing that is very, very cheap.”

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