The easy-money days for software-as-a-service companies are over.

For years, SaaS firms had a Wall Street-ready story: customers subscribe, revenue rolls in, and profits can wait.

Not anymore.

With growth cooling and artificial intelligence threatening to make some software cheaper, easier to copy or less essential, investors, lenders and auditors are demanding something more than slick “recurring revenue” pitches.

They want proof.

Proof customers are sticking around. Proof margins work. Proof cash flow is real. Proof those big balance-sheet values still hold up.

“What changed is, first of all, growth,” David Khalil, chief financial officer of saas.group, said in an April 27, 2026, interview with Thomson Reuters. “2021, 2022, the average public SaaS company probably was still kind of growing 30% per year, and now we are sitting in the low teens when it comes to growth rates.”

To dig deeper, visit the original article on the Thomson Reuters blog.