About SaaS Bounties
SaaS Bounties is the public-facing platform of the AI Alternatives Project, an empirical research initiative that measures the relationship between AI-assisted coding and SaaS incumbent products.
The question we're asking
The debate about AI's impact on SaaS has been loud and mostly unproductive. Opinions dominate because data is scarce. The AI Alternatives Project exists to generate that data.
The question we're measuring is specific: how much time and effort does it take a developer using AI-assisted coding tools to build software that is functionally equivalent to a real SaaS product?
What we measure
- Time and effort to replicate defined SaaS feature sets
- Which AI tools were used and how
- Feasibility across different SaaS product categories
- Quality of AI-generated implementations
What we don't measure
- Whether AI-generated alternatives can compete in the market
- Distribution, trust, switching costs, or support dynamics
- Whether any specific SaaS company is at risk
- Whether AI agents will replace the need for software products
How the data is used
Submitted codebases and prompt histories are reviewed privately and solely to verify that the submission meets the bounty spec. Your code is never made public, shared with third parties, or used for any purpose beyond this review. You retain full ownership and all rights to your code. Only anonymized, aggregated metrics — time spent, tools used, and spec completion — are published through the AI Alternatives Project.
The bounty system
Each bounty is a detailed feature specification derived from an existing SaaS product's public documentation. Specifications are written to be unambiguous enough to make consistent evaluation possible. A submission "earns" the bounty when it meets the spec at a quality bar that makes the data meaningful — partial implementations don't count.