[trimethylpurine]

likely due to subscription fatigue

It's due to a-hole fatigue. These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much. There are just too many vendors in the middle to get any expectation of a good experience. And to top it off, every time I buy SaaS the vendor is bought by some private equity giant before the first payment and the product turns to shit by the second one.

That said, it depends what the software does. If it's a platform for sharing or interacting with the public (e.g. eBay), then a true web app makes a lot of sense to me.

[satvikpendem]

> These are too often just VMs running an installed solution in a 3rd party cloud, run like garbage and cost way too much

I mean, you try making such software and let me know how that goes for you. This type of vague criticism sounds a lot like the typical engineer retort of "I can build it myself in a weekend," discounting the real complexity involved.

[trimethylpurine]

I'll try to be more specific. Stuffing a win32 app into a Citrix box and selling it to the next private equity that will offshore your support while your customer's contract milks them for another 3 years doesn't make for an enticing offer for decision makers. It makes a lot of sense for the private equity purchaser who will sell the company again before those contracts run dry and the software is shuttered or replaced.

As the decision maker (also a software engineer) I will work hard to avoid SaaS because it's a sensible move. And that is especially true if other engineers believe as you do that it's difficult to make a good product.

By comparison, the same app, installed locally, doesn't suffer from any of the above problems. There is no contract, no latency, and I don't have any risk if the company is sold. I will likely just have to find another solution provider, in the last case, but at least I'm not locked into additional years of servitude supporting a poor product for my users.

In summary, SaaS itself might be great. But the subscriptions that it usually comes with tend to incentivize bad vendor behavior and a poor customer experience.

[satvikpendem]

Why would there be no contract with a local app? At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be. These aren't going to be standalone 100 dollar apps for that level of scale.

[trimethylpurine]

>At the company scales you're talking about, enterprise, there absolutely will be.

Many very large enterprise software providers (Sage, Oracle, IBM) and small OSS shops (Grafana, Zabbix, ProxMox) offer run local versions of ERPs or entire applications with no usage restrictions. The licensing pays for support and updates, not usage. In this model, the software provider has incentive to provide good support, and quality updates. They care to maintain the product because their care is what they are selling.

So, it won't absolutely be the case at this scale. Business as usual is the opposite of that at this scale. I should have to prove beyond doubt that there is no alternative when I agree to sign for SaaS. I'm agreeing to take on a lot of risk when I do that.

>Why would there be no contract with a local app?

Because that's what I want to buy, and for good reason (see above). And someone has figured that out and sold it to me.