Vertical SaaS Renaissance, LLM Retention Surge, and AI Hardware Demand Wave
Vertical SaaS demonstrates strong sales momentum with improved quota attainment and lead sentiment outpacing enterprise peers. LLM products show exceptionally strong retention curves with ChatGPT's rates improving continuously and Gemini exhibiting a 'smiling' curve. Open-source AI models are rapidly capturing market share while AI adoption drives unexpected hardware demand spikes for Mac minis and Raspberry Pis.
Metrics in this report
67 to 55%
median
30-year decline from Dotcom era to present
23weeks
point estimate
upward inflection from baseline decline
20+minutes/day
range (leaders)
Deepseek and Claude leading, followed by Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini
10%
point estimate
OpenRouter, open-weight models
10weeks
point estimate
recovery point after initial dip
33%
annual rate
3x faster than prior year
15%
range estimate
new units, from ~$500 to ~$570
25%
point estimate
OpenRouter, open-weight models
13%
peak observation
two-week period following release
historical highsrelative
peak observation
coinciding with SG&A and COGS declines
improved dramaticallyrelative performance
categorical
vs Finance & ERP, Marketing, Productivity enterprise categories
15%
mean
with acceleration through year
50%
range estimate
following OpenClaw and tutorial proliferation
45%
point estimate
OpenRouter token consumption