IT teams sign multi-year contracts without visibility into whether a vendor is about to be acquired, raise prices, or degrade their product.
Pull public financials, ownership records, pricing history, community sentiment, and employee turnover data to generate a vendor risk score. Integrate into procurement workflows.
Subscription SaaS - per seat or per vendor report, enterprise tier with API and custom alerts
Real pain but episodic. IT teams feel it acutely when a vendor gets acquired (Broadcom/VMware, Citrix/Cloud Software Group) and prices jump 300%, but between those events the urgency fades. The pain is intense when it hits but most teams don't think about it proactively until burned. The Reddit signals are genuine but represent a vocal minority — most procurement teams still evaluate vendors on features and price, not trajectory risk.
TAM estimate: ~$2-4B addressable within the broader $7B+ TPRM market. There are ~50K mid-to-large enterprises with formal IT procurement processes globally. At $20K-$100K/yr per customer, that's substantial. However, the initial beachhead is narrower — forward-thinking CIOs and IT procurement teams at companies that have been burned before. Realistic SAM for year 1-2 is more like $50-100M.
Mixed signals. Enterprises already pay $50K-$150K/yr for TPRM tools, proving budget exists in this category. But 'enshittification risk' is a new concept that procurement teams don't have a line item for yet. You'd be creating a category, not filling an existing one. Easier sell as an add-on to existing TPRM workflows than a standalone product. Willingness increases dramatically AFTER a team has been burned by a vendor acquisition — selling to the recently traumatized is the wedge.
Challenging for solo dev in 4-8 weeks. The data aggregation layer is the hard part: SEC filings and public financials are accessible but messy, Glassdoor/LinkedIn scraping is legally risky and technically fragile, Reddit/HN sentiment requires NLP, pricing history has no standard source. A credible MVP could pull SEC filings + Crunchbase ownership data + G2/Glassdoor review sentiment + Reddit/HN mentions and produce a basic composite score. The 'enshittification score' is novel but the individual signals are scrapeable. LLMs help enormously with sentiment analysis. 8 weeks is tight but possible for a narrow MVP covering top 200 enterprise SaaS vendors.
Clear white space. No existing product connects financial health + ownership stability + product quality trajectory + community sentiment into a forward-looking vendor risk score. The market is split: security/compliance tools (SecurityScorecard, OneTrust) ignore vendor viability, and SaaS management tools (Zylo, Vendr) ignore risk entirely. RapidRatings does financial prediction well but is blind to software-specific degradation signals. Nobody is doing 'enshittification scoring.' This is the strongest dimension of the idea.
Naturally subscription. Vendor risk is continuous — companies need ongoing monitoring, not one-time reports. Contract renewals happen on cycles (1-3 years), creating recurring decision points. Alert-based monitoring (notify me if my vendor gets acquired, raises prices, or shows degradation signals) is inherently a subscription feature. Enterprise procurement workflows are sticky once integrated. Net revenue retention should be strong as customers add more vendors to monitor.
- +Clear competitive white space — nobody combines financial health + ownership stability + enshittification signals into one score
- +Category-defining concept ('enshittification risk score') that is timely and resonant given Broadcom/VMware, Citrix, and PE rollup trends
- +Natural enterprise SaaS model with strong recurring revenue mechanics and high switching costs once embedded in procurement workflows
- +Pain is real, evidenced by organic community outrage and the growing frequency of PE-driven vendor degradation events
- +LLMs make the sentiment analysis and data synthesis layer dramatically more feasible now than it would have been 2 years ago
- !Data sourcing is the existential risk — financial data for private companies is limited, pricing history has no standard source, and scraping Glassdoor/LinkedIn is legally fragile. If you can't get reliable data, the scores are meaningless.
- !Category creation problem: you're selling something procurement teams don't know they need yet. Sales cycles could be long and require significant education. Selling to the 'recently burned' narrows the addressable funnel.
- !Incumbents could add this as a feature — SecurityScorecard or Zylo adding a 'vendor health' tab would compress your opportunity. Speed to market and depth of scoring are the moat.
- !Scoring accuracy is make-or-break. One false alarm (flagging a healthy vendor) or one miss (not flagging a vendor that gets acquired) destroys credibility. You need enough historical data to validate the model before launch.
- !Enterprise sales cycle is 3-9 months. Getting to revenue will be slow unless you find a self-serve wedge (free vendor lookup tool, report-based pricing).
Continuous cybersecurity ratings platform that grades organizations A-F on security posture using outside-in data collection across 10 risk factors. Scores 12M+ companies.
Financial health ratings using proprietary FHR
Third-party risk management platform combining vendor risk assessments, continuous monitoring, and managed services across cyber, financial, operational, reputational, and ESG risk domains.
SaaS management platform for discovery, license optimization, and renewal management. Auto-discovers all SaaS in use, tracks spend and utilization, provides pricing benchmarks.
SaaS buying and negotiation platform providing pricing benchmarks, negotiation support, and renewal management. Aggregates anonymized transaction data across thousands of customers.
A web app that lets you search any of the top 500 enterprise SaaS vendors and see a 'Vendor Health Card' with: (1) Financial stability grade from public filings/Crunchbase, (2) Ownership risk flag (PE-backed, recent acquisition, founder-led), (3) Community sentiment trend from Reddit/HN/G2 over last 12 months, (4) Pricing change history where available, (5) A composite 'enshittification risk' score 0-100. Seed the database with curated profiles for the most common enterprise SaaS (Salesforce, Atlassian, VMware, Zoom, etc.). Offer free lookups with limited detail, paid reports with full analysis. Skip API/procurement integration for MVP — just nail the scoring accuracy.
Free vendor lookup (limited signals, top-line score only) -> Paid individual reports at $99-$299/vendor for deep analysis -> Team subscription at $500-$2K/mo for portfolio monitoring and alerts -> Enterprise tier at $20K-$100K/yr with API integration, custom alerts, procurement workflow embedding, and dedicated coverage of their specific vendor stack
3-4 months to first dollar via individual paid reports. 6-9 months to first subscription customer. 12-18 months to first enterprise contract. The self-serve report model is the fastest path — don't wait for enterprise sales cycles to validate revenue.
- “Do you consider vendor's financial health when migrating?”
- “Someone should buy them and put a stop to this”
- “someone is going to buy this and make it be a bad product”