[perrygeo]

The default has been pay $x/month for every service. I've seen startups that require a dozen service accounts just to run the software, and dozens more to get onboarded org wide. One service for feature flags. One service for logs. One service for traces. One service for error handling. Another service for ticket tracking, which is completely separate from your planning, design, and CI services. Jesus. What do people hope to accomplish here besides just defering blame?

Replacing SAAS isn't about building a replacement services 1:1. It's about figuring out what you actually needed in the first place! Often we only use a tiny fraction of what the full-blown SAAS offers. IOW it's about eliminating the service entirely and building something that fits your actual needs, rather than following what some VC thinks your needs are.

AI or not, the "build vs buy" pendulum is now swinging hard to build. And IMO that's a real opportunity to consolidate, trim some fat, and actually apply engineering practices rather than just blindly signing up for every SAAS that crosses your path.

[habinero]

This fundamentally misunderstands a couple of things.

DIY software is "free" like a free yacht is free. It initially looks appealing but there's a lot of expensive hidden costs and upkeep and pitfalls and problems.

For one, this is a bad assumption:

> building something that fits your actual needs

Unless your business is very small and not growing, this is a moving target. Your needs are going to change as you grow and different groups in the org are going to have different needs.

You really don't want to be dicking around creating software that already exists instead of doing the shit that actually makes you money. Spending a few hundo thousand on a bunch of software is nothing, you spend that on one engineer.

You buy a SaaS product because you have a problem and want to throw money at someone else to deal with it.