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AI SaaS that hold up

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Issue #03 Trends May 4, 2026 7 min read

Choosing a software vendor in 2026: the evaluation framework

In 2026, the risk is no longer the wrong product — it's the wrong vendor. Solidity, technology, delivery, reversibility: a 5-axis framework to avoid the costly mistakes, with the questions that actually separate serious vendors from the rest.

OS

OCEAN SOFT

Published on May 4, 2026

Read the issue

70%

of SaaS failures trace back to the vendor, not the product

5

structural axes to evaluate any serious software vendor

2026 editorial roadmap

The topics we cover

Six structural axes to understand the AI SaaS industry and build products that last.

RAG & knowledge

Hybrid embeddings, re-ranking, continuous evaluation. The information pipeline that grounds LLMs in your data.

Agents in production

Narrow scope, human-in-the-loop, end-to-end observability. What holds up beyond the demo.

Sovereignty & GDPR

INPDP, GDPR, AI Act, EU and sovereign hosting. Why compliance precedes code.

Pricing & business model

Usage-based, outcome-based, hybrid. How to bill for value when marginal cost is variable.

Architecture & infra

Stacks, model choices, monitoring, GPU costs. Technical decisions that scale.

Field reports

Pilots, rollouts, post-mortems. What works, what fails, and why.

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