5 OS SaaS ideas to launch in 2026

There's a new movement happening in SAS and it's not AI. Founders are waking up.

We're realizing that the convenience of big tech has come at the cost of our margins and our control. So, we're

seeing a massive migration from the cloud back to bare metal infrastructure and open-source software. [music] So,

instead of fighting over users in the AI space, there is now a big opportunity to capitalize on this movement. And in this video, I want to cover five SAS ideas in

this space. I believe could be huge.

this space. I believe could be huge.

If you're new to this channel, welcome here. I'm Simon Horberg and I run a SAS

here. I'm Simon Horberg and I run a SAS portfolio of five SAS tools. And if

you're wondering why I'm here handing out SAS ideas for free instead of just building them myself, it's because I am.

My SAS portfolio founder stack contains five SAS tools already. And because I work with SAS every single day, I get a ton of ideas I believe could have

amazing potential. But obviously, I

amazing potential. But obviously, I cannot build them all. So instead of keeping them to myself, I'd much rather talk about them here. So maybe you can take one of these ideas and [music] run

with it. So without further ado, let's

with it. So without further ado, let's get to it. The first idea is an open-source affiliate marketing tool.

Now, this one actually comes from a very real personal pain point. We recently

launched the partner program for Founder Stack. And naturally, we needed a tool

Stack. And naturally, we needed a tool to handle affiliate links, tracking, and payouts. So, I tried a bunch of the most

payouts. So, I tried a bunch of the most well-known tools on the market. And

don't get me wrong, they're great tools, but they all had one major requirement that had me think again. [music] In

order for these tools to work, you have to connect them to your Stripe account.

You have to give them read access to your revenue, your customer emails, and your transaction history. [music] And

honestly, I just wasn't comfortable with that. sharing that level of sensitive

that. sharing that level of sensitive financial data with a third party tool just to track some clicks just didn't feel right. So instead, we decided to

feel right. So instead, we decided to vibe code our own solution. It took us about a week and we now have a fully custom partner platform running on our own infrastructure. But it got me

own infrastructure. But it got me realizing something. If there had been a

realizing something. If there had been a solid open-source affiliate tool that I could have self-hosted on my own server, I would have picked that in a heartbeat.

And I think this is a massive opportunity for 2026. [music]

First of all, it solves the privacy issue. You keep your Stripe keys and

issue. You keep your Stripe keys and your customer data on your own database.

No third party ever gets access to any of your sensitive data. And secondly, it solves transparency. A huge [music]

solves transparency. A huge [music] issue with affiliate programs is trust.

Are partners actually getting the payouts they've earned? And is the attribution logic fair? With an open source platform, this code would be public. [music] Your partners can

public. [music] Your partners can inspect the logic and confirm that you are being honest with sales attribution.

[music] That builds a level of trust that a blackbox says simply can't match.

[music] Now, if I were to build this as a business today, I would structure the monetization in three [music] layers.

One, a free community edition, fully open source. Anyone can fork it and host

open source. Anyone can fork it and host it. [music] This gets you distribution

it. [music] This gets you distribution and makes it the standard. Two, a pro lifetime [music] license. you sell a supporter edition that comes with advanced features, maybe multi- teamam

support or advanced analytics for a onetime fee. And [music] three, and this

onetime fee. And [music] three, and this is the big one, a full done for you service. This would be the equivalent of

service. This would be the equivalent of a merchant of record, but specifically [music] for affiliate payouts. You offer service where you handle the tax compliance and the actual money transfer to the

affiliates while a software runs on their server. I really think the market

their server. I really think the market is begging for a solution like this. The

second idea is an agentic QA tester.

So, not long ago, I saw this tweet and it sparked [music] quite a bit of debate. But I'll be completely honest

debate. But I'll be completely honest with you, I don't look at all the code the AI is generating anymore either.

[music] In fact, I stopped asking the AI to refactor or optimize for human readability because I figured it's most likely an AI that will be reading and maintaining that code in the future

anyway. Instead, I simply do manual QA

anyway. Instead, I simply do manual QA on the solution that the AI built to see if everything still works. Though, I've

noticed one thing. Having an AI go over another AI's work, sometimes even multiple times, drastically increases the quality of the code. So, why

wouldn't this principle apply to the QA part, too? Imagine a tool where instead

part, too? Imagine a tool where instead of writing all these comprehensive Cyprus or Playright tests that break [music] every time you change a tiny little thing, you just give the AI a

mission. Go to the pricing page, select

mission. Go to the pricing page, select the pro plan, and make sure the checkout flow works. This agent would spin up a

flow works. This agent would spin up a headless browser, look at the screen using computer vision, [music] and click through the application exactly like a human would. It solves the biggest

human would. It solves the biggest [music] pain in testing, which is maintenance. You get the reliability of

maintenance. You get the reliability of end-to-end testing without the nightmare of constantly keeping your testing logic up to date. Now, how do you monetize this? Well, this is the perfect

this? Well, this is the perfect candidate for a usage-based [music] pricing model. You are selling a junior

pricing model. You are selling a junior QA engineer. So, you charge per test run

QA engineer. So, you charge per test run or per agent minute or maybe just AI credits and then let the user top up.

You could also offer a higher tier enterprise plan where the agent runs inside their own VPC. So unreleased

products never touch your cloud. This is

a massive compliance requirement for big tech and some companies will pay a premium for that privacy. Idea number

three is what I call a shadow database tool. We all use these amazing no code

tool. We all use these amazing no code tools to run our businesses. We use

tools for our project management, for our CRM, and for our internal vickies.

And the user experiences of these commercial products like Notion and Air Table are incredible. They are miles ahead of most open- source alternatives and certainly way ahead of anything we

could ever build ourselves. But they all come with one massive downside. They own

your data. If one of these platforms decide to double their pricing or if they decide to change their terms or worst case, if they decide to ban your [music] account, you are completely

locked out. your business data is

locked out. your business data is trapped inside their proprietary data stores. [music] This is the classic

stores. [music] This is the classic vendor lock trap. So the idea here is to build a data liberation engine. Think of

it as a sync tool [music] that connects to the APIs of these SAS platforms and pulls your data in real time into a standard [music] raw Postgress database that you host on

your server. Now you can still use the

your server. Now you can still use the SAS product exactly as you do today.

You're not replacing it, but you are creating a live readonly mirror of every single piece of data you create. It's

effectively a data insurance against vendor lock. If the SAS provider ever

vendor lock. If the SAS provider ever becomes a problem or if they shut down, you don't just have a messy export dump.

You have a structured SQL database with all your customers tasks and notes ready to be plugged into a new tool.

This product would then have a bunch of different connectors to other popular platforms. So [music] if you were to move from notion to Monday, you would simply click a button and this tool

would normalize your data from notion and then import it into Monday automatically. In terms of monetization,

automatically. In terms of monetization, I would follow the open core model here.

The core sync engine is free and open source. This gets you the trust of the

source. This gets you the trust of the developer community because they [music] can inspect the code and see that you aren't stealing anyone's data. But then

you monetize on the connectors. Maybe

the connectors for tools like notion or air table is free, but the connectors to Salesforce, SAP [music] or Oracle, the enterprise connectors requires a paid license. And of course, you can offer a

license. And of course, you can offer a managed cloud version where you host the shadow database for them for a monthly subscription. That's a very proven, very

subscription. That's a very proven, very scalable business model. SAS idea number four is a self-hosted AI media studio.

Right now, if you want to generate highquality AI images or videos, you generally have two options. You can go to platforms like Midjourney or Runway.

These are completely closed ecosystems running their own proprietary models. Or

you can use aggregators like Open Art.

Now, Open Art is great because it lets you use and combine different models in one place. But their business model is

one place. But their business model is based on credits. Essentially, they are reselling you the compute, but with a markup. You pay a subscription, you get

markup. You pay a subscription, you get a balance, and when it runs out, you pay again. But if we look [music] at the

again. But if we look [music] at the textbased AI world, we have this incredible tool called typing mic. If

you haven't seen it, it's a beautiful UI that let you chat with GBT5, cla or Gemini. But instead of paying a monthly

Gemini. But instead of paying a monthly subscription for credits, you simply buy a one-time license for the software and then you plug in your own API key.

[music] This means you are paying wholesale prices for the AI inference directly to the provider. No markup, no middleman.

the provider. No markup, no middleman.

[music] We need this exact same model, but for AI video and images. The idea is to build a self-hostable UI that sits on top of AI pass providers like Replicate

or Fell AI. It would be a studio tool that let you chain together the most popular models like [music] Flux or Nano Banana for images or cling or Pixieverse or Sora for video. You wouldn't be

selling credits. You wouldn't be selling

selling credits. You wouldn't be selling compute. You are simply selling the

compute. You are simply selling the interface. The user brings their own API

interface. The user brings their own API key from replicate. They pay replicate directly for the generation. You just

provide an awesome UI workflow builder to combine these models. And in terms of monetization, this is a perfect [music] candidate for the lifetime license model. Just like typing mine, you sell

model. Just like typing mine, you sell the software for a onetime fee. For

instance, $79 or $99. Since you don't have any server cost because the user connects directly to the AI provider, your recurring cost is effectively zero.

It's pure software play. You build it once, you update it occasionally, and you sell the license forever. This is

exactly the kind of low overhead, high margin business that is perfect for a solo founder in 2026. The last idea is unfortunately a bit more serious. One of

my favorite YouTubers, Pat Walls from Starter Story, recently had a terrible experience with YouTube. Out of nowhere, his content started getting flagged [music] as dangerous. And he started

receiving strikes on his channel. And as

you know, after three strikes, YouTube doesn't just suspend you, they may delete your entire channel. Years of

work gone overnight. He talked about this on Twitter. And as it turns out, it wasn't just him. This started happening to a bunch of business YouTubers seemingly due to some AI moderation

error. Now, fortunately, I haven't

error. Now, fortunately, I haven't experienced any of this myself, but seeing that happen to the starter story channel made me incredibly uncomfortable, and it is a harsh

reminder that we cannot really rely on big tech for our businesses. We are

building our houses on rented land. So,

the idea is to build a self-hostable YouTube clone. I'm talking about a

YouTube clone. I'm talking about a platform you can spin up on your own server that functions exactly like [music] YouTube. It handles the video

[music] YouTube. It handles the video hosting, the streaming, the quality adjustments, and it has a full UI for likes, [music] comments, and related video suggestions, and so on. Now, to be

clear, this obviously cannot replace YouTube as a platform and the network.

But it's a place where your viewers can go and watch your content if the unthinkable happens. [music]

unthinkable happens. [music] Place where you own the platform, you own the database of comments, and you own the subscribe button. In terms of monetization, this is the perfect

creator economy tool. You could release the community edition for free, which just handles video hosting, perfect for personal archives or small channels, but then you could monetize by selling

membership features as a paid license.

This would allow creators to turn their self-hosted platform into their own version of Patreon or YouTube Premium.

They can put their videos behind a payw wall, [music] connect their own Stripe account, and keep 100% of the revenue from their biggest fans. In 2026,

creators are waking up to the platform risk. [music]

risk. [music] Selling them the ultimate backup plan is, in my opinion, a very powerful value proposition. [music]

proposition. [music] Now, as you know, these are just ideas.

They are completely worthless if you don't execute. And if you feel the

don't execute. And if you feel the analysis paralysis kicking in already, let me [music] help you out. Cuz in this video, I'm showing you how to build a niche AI SAS with lovable and replicate

step by step. So take one of these ideas, go watch this video next, and then go build yourself a SAS.