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Embedded commerce encompasses the full commercial transaction (paying, financing, delivery) directly into the software a business already uses to run its operations. SaaS+ is subscription software plus those embedded financial and commerce services in the same workflow. Consumer software solved this years ago; B2B, where trillions still move by check and manual terms, is where it’s happening now.

The classic objection to vertical software — “how big can a niche really get?” — assumes revenue is capped at what the industry pays for software. The winners monetize a share of everything that moves through the niche: payments, financing, logistics. The niche was never the limit. The seat-based model was the limit.

A vertical SaaS company’s defensibility comes from three things stacked together: owning the industry’s system of record, encoding years of domain depth, and moving the industry’s money. A horizontal tool can copy a feature. It can’t copy your position in the industry or your hold on the money.

TLDR: The value in software has moved from the application to the workflow, and workflows are vertical. The companies that win in the next decade won’t be the ones with the broadest horizontal tools. They’ll be the vertical platforms that own one industry’s system of record and monetize everything that moves through it. Why is the next wave of SaaS vertical rather than horizontal? Because the scarce thing is no longer software itself; it’s software that understands a specific