Dries Buytaert Says AI Could Shift Software Spending Toward Dependability

Software companies may need to rethink what customers pay for as AI lowers the cost of producing code, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert argues in a blog post published on 17 August 2026. Writing in The Software Business After Code Scarcity, Dries compares AI-generated applications with a question open source businesses have long faced: how to build commercial value when software itself is abundant. He argues that open source and AI create abundance differently, with open source expanding rights to use, modify, and redistribute code while AI reduces the cost of producing or recreating it.

That distinction matters, in his view, because proprietary SaaS businesses typically bundle access to software with the hosting and operations needed to run it. Dries suggests that as application functionality becomes cheaper to recreate, customers may become less willing to pay simply for access while continuing to pay for deployment, security, scaling, monitoring, and reliable operation. He presents dependability as a potential differentiator even when the underlying software becomes cheaper to produce.

Dries grounds the argument in Drupal and Acquia. Because Drupal was freely available, he says Acquia could not build a durable business around access to the code and instead focused on helping enterprises build, run, manage, secure, scale, and improve Drupal applications. He suggests that AI may push more software companies toward similar economics, making operational dependability more commercially important as access to code and application capabilities becomes less scarce.