[pleoxy]

> True, but SaaS still runs on cloud infrastructure so the costs are still there

You can bring the costs way down. Their margins include a pretty insane amount of features that not everyone needs. There is a lot of meat there if you have skills in the area.

Making/saving money via DIY compute is an area ripe for improvement via better vertical integration.

The big cloud providers simply do not have this market cornered even with this mind share that prevents perfectly good engineers from seeing the path plain before them.