[bobx11]

Seems more likely that they want the database connections than the revenue. Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem is writing Integrations into other platforms and if they make it easier to ingest data in Salesforce and keep you there it will be more sticky.

[ben_jones]

As someone who just finished a custom caching solution for Salesforce-backed data I couldn't agree more. There are a number of solutions out there that attempt to mirror salesforce to i.e. Postgres, but they are expensive. Plenty of people want to leave Salesforce but are caught in by the cost of exfiltration.

That said Salesforce isn't THAT bad. There are plenty of edge cases, dark spots in documentation, shitty pricing tiers, BUT there's also a lot of cool stuff you can do with it and most of the cool stuff is incredibly well geared for solving common business problems.

[codeulike]

Salesforce deserve a lot of credit for staying online for 15 years or so while upgrading and expanding the platform every six months, while minimising breakage to customers' customisations. Imagine how most projects would look if you tried that, the developers would usually want to scrap it and re-write after 18 months or so.

[chrisweekly]

Also, massive credit for being a pioneer of SaaS per se. IMHO that's the most profound and impressive aspect to their success and legacy.

[ccmonnett]

I'm looking for one of these 'mirror SFDC (or Zendesk) to Postgres' solutions. No fancy integrations/automated workflows: just back up a Salesforce CRM to Postgres at least every 15 minutes. Fivetran has seemed to be the best fit for this simple use case. Is there an alternative you recommend?