We are watching one of the biggest shifts in tech happen right in front of us. Pure-play software companies that once raised hundreds of millions on the promise of endless subscription revenue are starting to look shaky. The old model of building a SaaS product once and selling it to everyone is cracking under the weight of AI. What is taking its place is something quieter, more personal, and far less glamorous: custom software built by small teams of one to five people who understand a specific business inside out.
Case to the micro teams point:
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our
The numbers tell the story clearly. In early 2026, Retool surveyed 817 builders and found that 35 percent of teams had already replaced at least one paid SaaS tool with something they built themselves. Even more striking, 78 percent said they plan to build even more custom tools this year. The categories getting hit first are the ones we all rely on every day: workflow automation, internal admin dashboards, business intelligence reports, CRMs, project management, and customer support systems.
Why is this happening now? Two big reasons. First, subscription fatigue is real. Companies are tired of paying for tools that never quite fit their exact processes and that come with slow support tickets. Second, and more important, AI has collapsed the cost and time it takes to build software. What used to require months of engineering work and six-figure budgets can now be prototyped in days with natural language prompts, what people are calling “vibe coding.” More than half the builders in that same survey have already shipped production software using AI, and nearly all of them use large language models daily.
The result is a quiet explosion of shadow IT. Sixty percent of the people surveyed admitted they built tools outside official IT channels last year, mostly because waiting for central approval was simply too slow. A three-person team at one company rebuilt an expensive third-party automation suite and saved hundreds of thousands in headcount and another $200,000 a year in software fees. Another team threw out a $20,000-per-year tool because vendor support was so bad it was faster to rebuild it themselves.
This is not a temporary trend. It is the new normal. Generic SaaS platforms will survive in niches where they act as systems of record or heavy integration layers, but the day-to-day software that actually runs businesses is moving in-house. Enterprises are pulling their AI agents out of vendor clouds and into their own environments for control, cost, and audit reasons. The era of “one size fits most” is ending.
That leaves us with an interesting problem. The people doing the building, these micro-teams of one to five developers or citizen developers, are incredibly efficient. They deliver exactly what a customer needs at a fraction of the old cost. But they do not create the kind of explosive, scalable revenue that traditional venture capital needs to justify its bets. There will still be plenty of software built, just not the kind that produces unicorn exits. So how do these small teams raise the modest amounts of capital they need to get started or to scale a few key projects without giving up control to a VC who expects 10x or 100x returns?
This is where crypto starts to look surprisingly practical. Tokenization mechanisms, especially the newer revenue-sharing and micro-DAO models, could fill exactly the gap that traditional funding leaves behind.
We are already seeing the pieces come together. Security token offerings let small teams turn a slice of equity or a specific project into digital shares that anyone can buy. Smart contracts handle dividends and cap-table updates automatically. Platforms like Brickken have matured enough that a two-person team can raise $100,000 from a few hundred global backers without months of legal back-and-forth.
Even more promising are pure revenue-sharing tokens. These tokens automatically pay holders a percentage of the team’s future revenue through on-chain distributions. No manual checks, no trust issues. Early examples in other sectors, such as The Invention Network, show how this works. Token holders get real cash flow from actual usage instead of hoping for a distant IPO. For a micro-team building custom internal tools or AI agents for a handful of clients, this alignment is perfect. Clients who use the software can become token holders and earn a cut while the team keeps operational control.
Add in simple utility tokens that give early supporters priority access to the team’s AI agents or future updates, wrap it in a lightweight DAO for governance, and you have a funding model that matches the scale of the work. Investors get liquidity on secondary markets and yield-like returns. Builders avoid dilution and board seats. Everyone stays aligned around real usage instead of growth-at-all-costs metrics.
Of course, this path is not friction-free. Securities laws still apply, and getting the structure right requires some legal help. Crypto markets can be volatile, and not every developer wants to become a token economist overnight. But the infrastructure is here today. Real-world asset tokenization is moving from experiments to mainstream, with projections reaching trillions by 2030, and the same rails that work for tokenized treasuries or real estate can be adapted for small software revenue streams.
We are heading into a decade where most software is bespoke, agent-driven, and delivered by tiny, specialized teams. The venture capital model that powered the last fifteen years of SaaS will focus on the big infrastructure and model-layer winners. Everything else needs a different kind of capital, one that is patient, global, and tied directly to outcomes.
Crypto tokenization, done right, offers exactly that. The teams that figure out simple, compliant ways to tokenize their future revenue or project equity will have a real edge. They will attract aligned backers, move faster, and stay independent. The SaaS gold rush is winding down. The micro-team token economy is just getting started.
