Curative CEO and founder Fred Turner believes in the SaaSpocalypse.
During an interview on the "20VC with Harry Stebbings" podcast, the health insurance executive was asked whether he bought the theory that software-as-a-service was dying.
"Yes," Turner said, bluntly.
When asked why, he said, "I see the number of contracts that we're canceling. We just recently canceled our Salesforce contract because we have an internal CRM that was vibecoded."
That Salesforce contract cost Curative $600,000 a year, Turner said. He added that Curative built its replacement in two months.
Overall, Curative plans to cut about 80% of its SaaS spending this year, according to Turner. The company is spending on AI instead, he said.
He's describing the exact SaaSpocalypse fear that spooked Wall Street at the start of 2026. As AI coding agents quickly improved, investors feared that companies that bought software-as-a-service would turn to AI tools and build their own bespoke products. Software providers — such as Salesforce, Asana, DocuSign, ServiceNow, Adobe, and Workday — saw their stocks drop by 20% to 50% amid those snowballing concerns.
Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, has also strongly pushed back, saying that he's still seeing "incredible demand" for his products. He's also pointed out that Anthropic, the massive AI lab behind Claude, still uses Salesforce services.
"If there is a 'SaaSpocalypse,' it may be eaten by the 'SaaS-quatch' because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents," Benioff said during a February earnings call.
A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider that 150,000 companies still use its platforms and highlighted that its tools are built to navigate complex healthcare patient regulations, such as HIPAA.
"Our platform is built with trust and governance at its core," a Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider.
Turner acknowledged that replacing outside software with custom-built systems hasn't been perfect. Maintenance is "definitely one of the most challenging pieces," he said.
He also said Curative's spending on Anthropic had surged as the company found more uses for AI.
"Our Anthropic cost over the last six or seven months has 6x'd every month, from a base of a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, now up to millions of dollars a month," Turner said. "Eventually, we're going to have to stop that spending increase because it'll get unreasonable, but we just keep finding new things to do with it."
For Curative, however, Turner said the economics would still work — even if Anthropic were to quintuple its prices.
He pointed to Gwen, a bespoke AI agent Curative uses to negotiate contracts with doctors and other healthcare providers. Turner said completing one contract before AI had cost the company an average of $1,500 to $2,000. Gwen's average cost is about $70, he said.
"What we've done is said, 'Well, now that we have the agent, we can do 10 times as many contracts this year as we could do last year,'" Turner said. "So, we're going to do 10 times, and then we're going to try and do 20 times, and we would just do a lot more volume than you could possibly have done with a human team."
Curative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Salesforce declined to provide a comment.
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Ben Shimkus is a reporter for the Business News desk. He writes about cars, transportation, retail, and jobs. Ben's reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Verge, Automotive News, USA Today, AutoBody News, LGBTQ Nation, TopSpeed, and Out Magazine. He's also held staff writing positions at The U.S. Sun and the Daily Mail. He graduated from NYU with a Master's in journalism in 2024. Email Ben at [email protected] or message him privately on Signal at bshimkus.41.
