CROSS-CATEGORY: Payments Infrastructure, ITSM, and Marketing All Show Software Deflation Simultaneously on March 18

Stripe·high signal

Three unrelated SaaS categories produced independent software deflation signals on the same day: payments infrastructure (Stripe MPP and Visa CLI enabling AI agents as first-class payment actors), enterprise support and ITSM (Edra raising $30M at $1.8B to replace ServiceNow-tier workflows via instruction extraction from internal data), and marketing/chatbots (SaaStr documenting a $0.20 chatbot that beats 98% of commercial products). The common architecture across all three: commodity LLM inference plus company-owned data is now the replacement unit, not a vendor's feature set. When three unrelated categories hit the same threshold in one day, it signals the deflation is systemic, not sector-specific.