[aetherspawn]

We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.

Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.

Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.

This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?

I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.

I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.

[baobun]

> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.

> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.

Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.

But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...

Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.

One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).

[jazzyjackson]

I’m on Team Airgap but I would expect that bringing on dedicated devops staff to maintain internal systems would blow away any cost savings and leave you at higher risk for downtime if the one Linux Wizard you hired to set it all up leaves for greener pastures. At least the SaaSs have a higher bus factor.

And then you have your security risks of duplicating your access control. So you mirror all your employees emails, now you have to make sure only administrators have read access and avoid ever exposing that system to the internet and prevent exfil.

I’m thinking of how to do this for a friends company and the amount of stuff that a SaaS takes care of is staggering. Right now I’m stuck on learning to be my own root CA to distribute client certificates for mTLS so I can avoid relying on third party SSO/auth.

[ajb]

I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.

[dijit]

Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?

[scarface_74]

You pay $25 a seat to either Google (GSuite) or Microsoft. There is nothing to manage but signing into the account.

As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.

[zie]

You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s).

You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).

With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...

With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.

With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.

[scarface_74]

What do you think can “break” with logging in to your Google account and using GSuite? It’s basically the same thing as the consumer version.

It’s the same with O365.

[halfcat]

Email notifications from your CRM stop getting delivered to your employee’s inboxes (which means your business is losing revenue). CRM vendor says ”problem isn’t on our end”. Hopefully someone at your company understands DNS and MX records and SPF records and SMTP headers in log files so you can go back to your CRM vendor and keep barking up the chain until you get someone who understands how Mailgun works so you can explain to them how to fix their problem.

When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.

[zie]

Google closing your account for some random reason. Their API's being maliciously compliant. Their systems being down. Browser/client compatibility issues. Network/connectivity issues, etc.

Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.

Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.

[ajb]

Stuff does occasionally break. In my last place Google managed to wipe the HR drive. (Yes, I checked the audit logs to see if it was user error - nope). Of course, it should have been backed up, but HR were the only people with access so it wasn't.

It was fortunate that we were paying for the level where there was a separate way for discovery lawyers to suck out all your files, as that was the only way I found to get them back.

The other issue with gsuite is the file ownership model means that by default files are owned by an individual and can end up being lost after they leave. Transferring ownership is some kind of weird batch job that can fail and need to be retried.

[lostlogin]

> It’s the same with O365.

If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.

Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.

[frizlab]

There are many ways in which a cloud suite can fail. I was the guy zie is talking about for many years though it was not my main job.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Respectfully, as someone who manages Microsoft/Office 365, it’s absolutely not the same as the consumer editions. Those services run on different infrastructure and for the most part are different products/services. That isn’t just obvious from APIs and UXs; Microsoft also points it out all over documentation and processes.

Microsoft’s assumption is that businesses are using 365, and so both the number of features and the various paths to trouble tend reflect that.

To the random business owner, dropping them into anything other than Microsoft Admin Center is akin to dropping a tier one helpdesk agent into the AWS Management Console with no guidance. The trick is once you’re beyond a handful of employees you typically need to work beyond the MS Admin Center. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated with identities, deploy SSO, etc, you need to be working from the Azure or (duplicative) Entra portals. If you want to do something like route helpdesk email, you need to be in the Exchange Admin Center. Tweaking spam filters is in yet another portal (currently Security Center, although that has changed a few times). And so on. Not to mention the more esoteric features that are only available behind Graph API calls.

I used to administer Google Workspace environments too, and while that control panel is MUCH more friendly, it’s still exceedingly easy for a non-technical person following a random walkthrough online to foul up their environment. I’ve watched that happened first hand many times.

[cadamsau]

What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.

[ajb]

Well, at my previous company it was split between a few Devs. Annoying, but didn't take anything like a whole full-timer.

[dijit]

This is why it should be the c-suite making the final call, it might not seem like a lot of work but an hour of your time is in the region of $100-$150, but a full time IT person can be hired for €60/hr.

At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.

[scarface_74]

“We” did no such thing. Major enterprises have been in bed with Microsoft since the late 90s.

Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.

[mbreese]

Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.

I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.

[StellarScience]

We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.

IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.

I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.

[scarface_74]

20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.

Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.

There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.

[graemep]

> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.

That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.

[ajb]

The guy might have been a bit under loaded, at least after the initial burst, but given that SaaS wasn't available at the time I don't think there was a good alternative. Getting someone in part time would have been a false economy the first time something screwed up and they weren't in.

If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.

[esperent]

> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers

Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.

[scarface_74]

No serious company is going to go that route instead of using GSuite or O365. It doesn’t even offer an SSO solution that you can link to all of their other SaaS products.

And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?

[esperent]

I run a serious company and we have found MXRoute to be a great fit.

The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.

[scarface_74]

It’s different because you also get the complete office suite from Google.

Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?

[jazzyjackson]

In think they said even $6 per month per user was a bum deal next to $65/year flat for unlimited.

[formerphotoj]

This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!

[junto]

Softwarelizenzverschlimmbesserung

“Verschlimmbesserung” is a great German word that describes “an attempted improvement that actually makes things worse”.

[croemer]

Digitalisierungsschattenpreise

[cookiengineer]

As a German, I approve this wording.

Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal

[formerphotoj]

I'm having fun sounding this one out for myself! I like how it audibly bounces along via -ung -en -er -ei(eye) -ung and -al. Makes me wanna say, "Now That's Fahrvergnügen!" Or rather, Sprechenvergnügen?

[Terr_]

To save some folks a few clicks, "Digitization Shadow Prices".

[croemer]

This isn't a real word (yet) of course (at least no Google hits). Just made it up on the spot.

[valenterry]

I'm German and I wasn't sure if you made it up or if it existed before. :)

[zx8080]

> you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

Email saas vendor only lock-in seem to be the root of some vendor lock-ins.

[sam_lowry_]

> I write this while holding back tears (:/)

Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.

I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.

[graemep]

> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.

> I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing

Why not self-hosted alternatives?

> Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.

I find that hard to believe. Even cloud backup services are not that expensive.

[redserk]

> You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.

Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.

[raxxor]

You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.

[arielcostas]

You can also send out your emails via a relay, like Amazon SES, right? Host an email server (like opensmtd + Dovecot, or with Postfix+Dovecot), and forward external emails through SES.

[achrono]

>but wages are like 50x that these days

How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.

[arielcostas]

They are compared regarding "cost to the company". A median salary in Spain is 24k€/year, plus social security, which makes it around 31k/yr per employee. Yet I've seen several companies using crappy services' free tier (definitely not targeted for businesses) because paying 140€/yr for MS365 Business Standard and 85€/yr for 1Password was too much when "we can use Google Drive [with 'personal' Google Accounts not controlled by the organisation in any way] for free, and KeePassXC synced through Drive".

Now, compare 250-300€/employee/year with how much you spend on salaries, and think how much it's hurting productivity to have these weird (and probably against TOS) arrangements, compared to just paying a few bucks for software.