[notahacker]

If you're big enough for your brand image to be damaged by your bug reporting tool, customer analytics or payment flow having a third party logo, you're probably more in the realms of paying for the enterprise grade white labelling offering than 'are ten seats worth the money' anyway. Of course you can definitely wreck your sales with spammy use of email automation tools or evasive customer service, but that's more to do with how tools are used than the third party involvement.

And if SaaS is valuable enough to actually replace staff you've outgrown the simple decision making aid too, although I agree that you can dent morale at the margin by introducing SaaS oriented towards micromanagement or somewhat improve it with less crappy processes even with the simplest of software changes.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

For smaller organizations, the "plus" could outweigh the "minus."

For example, if the "beancounter" calculation says that the SaaS tool is "not worth it," but bringing it in might significantly project the brand, then it may be worth it, in a big way.

Same with advertising, but advertising is a bit easier to measure (after the fact, as opposed to before). Brand value is really difficult to measure in any kind of empirical manner.

But a bug reporting tool, if exposed to customers, is a very important branding surface.

Error handling/reporting is a huge deal that is often neglected by tech folks. For many of us, a console print or log entry may be quite sufficient, but for an end user, they may need a lot more HI.

I've encountered some ghastly bug reporting tools that were obviously designed by techs, for techs.