When ChatGPT launched everyone was predicting that developers would soon be obsolete.

This was about the same time we launched Open SaaS, our free, open-source SaaS starter. Using the same logic, you'd have expected that AI would have killed boilerplate starters by now. But we noticed the opposite trend.

Open SaaS just crossed 14,000 GitHub stars and its entire growth happened right in the middle of the vibe coding boom.

This surprised us. So we decided to talk to 40 of our users to learn why they turned to Open SaaS.

A renewed Energy to Build.​

After conducting 40+ user interviews, we noticed a trend: AI was unlocking all kinds of new builders.

Career devs, DevOps engineers, PMs, an ex-woodworker, a marketer with zero coding experience, and more were getting inspired to start on their Ideas. These were people who always had a SaaS idea but never had the time or skills, or people who were getting inspired to build new apps on top of AI.

Regardless of which type they were, it was AI that unlocked them.

"Two years ago I didn't believe I could build an application... So it's like kind of magic for me." — Leo, ex-marketer who built Messync

"If there was no Wasp, I don't think I would even start building this." — Sergio, 20-year backend veteran who built CTOBox

Another one of our users with no React or Node.js experience built a SaaS app and sold it to a major accounting firm for ~$100k.

And the most surprising fact of all: about half of those interviewed were people who had never built a full-stack app before.

AI gave them the confidence and inspiration to start, but a lot of them turned to Open SaaS to help them focus their efforts.

AI Can Do 90%. The Last 10% Is the Hardest.​

AI tools are getting insanely good. With Claude Design you can scaffold a professional-looking landing page in about an hour. Slap it into Claude Code, add on more components and CRUD logic, and you're almost done.

But it's things like Stripe webhooks, auth edge cases, environment management, deployment, and background jobs that really trip up builders.

These aren't necessarily code problems, they're architecture problems. And AI is great at generating code within a clean, working architecture, but you've got to have one first.

"Open SaaS made me feel secure, like I am not cutting any corners. Just using AI would make it harder to sleep at night." — Robbie, musician who built PeakMastering

"With Next.js App Router, I was constantly fighting the LLM to get the syntax right. Svelte runes were just the Wild West." — TK Garrett, ex-woodworker who built PlotTree

Good Code Makes AI Code Better​

After talking with Open SaaS users, we heard the same thing over and over again: having a solid, clean codebase to start with drastically improved the perfomance of AI-coding agents and tools.

And that makes sense, because when you use an opinionated, boilerplate codebase like Open SaaS, you've effectively already decided the architecture of your app for the AI and it no longer needs to spend resources on these decisions, or communicating with you in order to make them.

In the end, you can just let AI handle WHAT you want built because Open SaaS (or any other good boilerplate) already handles HOW it should be built.

Combining them solves for that tedious 10% that kills most projects.

"If you start with Open SaaS, 80% of the pains of vibe coding are taken care of for you already." — Kenny Rogers, vibe coding educator

"It covers 99% of what I need without me babysitting the AI." — TK Garrett

This is why Open SaaS grew steadily to 14k stars through every AI milestone — Cursor blowing up, Karpathy coining "vibe coding," and Claude Code launching.

The Starting Line Just Got More Crowded​

AI is empowering more people to become builders and entrepreneurs. But you still have to actually ship something, and few end up doing that.

The ones who do, they tend not to build or reinvent auth and payments from scratch. They start with a foundation that handles it for them, point their AI tools at it, and focus on what makes their app unique.

That's how Open SaaS got to 14,000 GitHub stars.

Most people aren't interested in the boilerplate. They're interested in their ideas. Open SaaS is just the fastest way to go from idea to production.

Don't let the 10% block you from shipping your SaaS.

Try Open SaaS​

Open SaaS is free, open-source, and ready to go. We're constantly updating it to be the best full-featured SaaS boilerplate out there. Here's what you get out of the box:

• Auth with Email, Google, GitHub, Slack, and more (no 3rd-party service needed)
• Background Jobs with PG Boss (no 3rd-party)
• Payments with Stripe, Polar.sh, or LemonSqueezy
• AI Agent Skills and Memory files included
• ShadCN UI components
• Example apps to learn from
• Email with SendGrid, Mailgun, or SMTP
• End-to-end type safety

Star us on GitHub if you think more people should know about it.

The last time Microsoft reported earnings, it seemed to do everything right, at least by the traditional metrics. Revenue was up 17%, profits soared 24%, and the company’s closely watched Azure cloud business beat internal forecasts. 

And then it got absolutely punished.

Microsoft’s stock dropped 10% the next day, wiping out $357 billion in market value. Investors looked past the traditional numbers, focusing on the company’s record $37.5 billion in quarterly capital spending, an AI revenue backlog heavily dependent on OpenAI, and a Copilot product that had reached just 3.3% of Microsoft 365’s commercial base.

The stock still hasn’t recovered, finishing last week down 22% from its 52-week high.

On Wednesday, Microsoft gets another chance, reporting its fiscal Q3 results after the market closes. Here’s a preview of the key numbers and storylines to watch.

Core earnings estimates: Analysts expect Microsoft to report revenue of about $81.4 billion, up 16% from a year ago, and earnings of $4.06 per share, up 17%, according to Yahoo Finance. Microsoft has beaten Wall Street’s estimates four quarters in a row.

Cloud expectations: Microsoft has said it expects Azure to grow 37% to 38% in constant currency (adjusted for fluctuations in exchange rates) in Q3. That would be a slight slowdown from the 38% it posted in Q2. Last time, Azure beat Microsoft’s own forecast but fell short of what analysts were privately expecting, a major factor in the historic stock plunge.

But the Azure number doesn’t tell the full story. CFO Amy Hood said on the last earnings call that if Microsoft had allocated all the GPUs it brought online in Q1 and Q2 solely to Azure (i.e., the company’s cloud customers), the growth rate would have been over 40%. 

Instead, the company split that capacity across Azure and its own products and operations, including Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and internal R&D. That means Azure growth is as much a reflection of how Microsoft chooses to allocate its resources as it is a measure of demand. 

A leaner Microsoft: Even in just the past few months, Microsoft has moved to cut costs and streamline its operations even as it continues to spend aggressively on AI infrastructure — attempting to demonstrate to Wall Street that it’s staying disciplined on operating expenses. 

• The company offered voluntary retirement to thousands of employees for the first time in its 51-year history, targeting workers whose age plus years of service total 70 or more. Hood is expected to discuss the financial details of the program on the earnings call.
• It flattened its management layers and overhauled its compensation structure, reducing the number of pay points from nine to five and decoupling stock awards from bonuses.
• Cloud and sales teams were put under spending and hiring freezes.
• Several senior execs announced their retirement, including Experiences and Devices chief Rajesh Jha, Developer Division leader Julia Liuson, and Xbox chief Phil Spencer. 

Capital spending: Microsoft is on pace to spend more than $100 billion on infrastructure in fiscal 2026, up from $88.7 billion the year before, mirroring spending surges across Big Tech. About two-thirds goes to GPUs and other hardware for AI and cloud workloads. 

Hood said capex spending would come down from the Q2 figure of $37.5 billion in the last quarter, but it will still be far above the company’s historical levels. Investors will be watching for any signal about whether the pace of spending is set to continue, level off, or accelerate. 

Copilot and AI monetization: Microsoft disclosed in January that its Copilot product had reached 15 million paid seats, roughly 3.3% of the Microsoft 365 commercial base of about 450 million, which has since been cited repeatedly as an example of the company falling short.

At $30 per user per month, Copilot represents a large revenue opportunity if adoption accelerates, and any new disclosures about overall usage will make big headlines. If the company doesn’t disclose this number in the new report, it could be telling, as well.

Microsoft’s contracted future revenue more than doubled to $625 billion last quarter, but about 45% of that was tied to OpenAI, thanks to the company’s renegotiated partnership with the ChatGPT maker, raising questions about risk of so much revenue connected to one company.

William Blair analyst Jason Ader noted after last quarter that Microsoft’s contracted future revenue still grew 28% after stripping out OpenAI, and that new contract signings surged 228%.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also introduced a new metric last quarter: “tokens per watt per dollar,” a measure of how much AI output the company gets for each unit of energy and capital it invests. He didn’t give an overarching number, but as an example, Nadella said Microsoft was able to process 50% more OpenAI workload on the same amount of infrastructure as before. 

The bigger picture: Not everyone is pessimistic. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, in two notes to clients last week, argued that the market is underestimating cloud growth and that fears about OpenAI and Anthropic displacing the big cloud providers are overblown. 

Ives pointed to more than $650 billion in combined AI infrastructure spending from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta in 2026, and estimated $3 trillion in enterprise and government AI spending over the next three years. He called the recent sell-off a buying opportunity. 

ServiceNow, a major enterprise software company, saw its stock drop 17% on its own quarterly results last week, a sign that business technology spending may be softer than expected. 

But Intel surged more than 20% after strong earnings, driven by a 22% jump in data center and AI revenue, a sign that demand for the computing infrastructure behind AI is broad-based. 

Earnings avalanche: Amazon, Google, and Meta all report the same afternoon as Microsoft, which means investors will be comparing Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud growth in real time. 

Check back Wednesday afternoon for coverage. 

Amended Agreement Provides Long-Term Clarity

The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies. Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly. The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities. The agreement spells out:   

• Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider. 

• Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032. Microsoft’s license will now be non-exclusive.  

• Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. 

• Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap.  

• Microsoft continues to participate directly in OpenAI’s growth as a major shareholder.  

While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we’re doing together remains ambitious. From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next-generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we’re excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.

The post The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.