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by isawczuk 14 days ago
I would disagree, but before let me acknowledge how well written article is and bread analogy is spot on. However, author complete discounted open source and ability to spin up open source software that will replicate almost 1:1 what SaaS offers without a pay-to-access requirement. Why spend thousands on integration with SaaS that you can take open source, vibe code missing features and start using? You say maintenance, but I'd argue that owning your data is more important that costs of maintenance. Like bread, when you learn and have ability to choose healthier product you never go back to store brought.
2 comments
clack1987 14 days ago
No. You should know that most software are developed for business. Free or too cheap is not good for business use. When I earn money or save money by a software, i can pay it to get full support.
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rglullis 14 days ago
Do you pay for support for all the FOSS you use?
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maccard 14 days ago
Personally, no. At work, when I can manage it yes. Why else do people pay for RHEL?
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maccard 14 days ago
This has been true for years already though - why would anyone use confluent over just running Kafka themselves, or self host sentry, elasticsearch, gitlab, mongo, databricks or grafana?
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rglullis 14 days ago
If you were running a startup that had at least 1 paid developer, the cost of outsourcing these services were a rounding error compared to the actual salaries. If you wanted to skimp on these other things, you'd be saving maybe 2% of your budget.

Now, these supporting services can quickly become more expensive than the cost of a subscription to a powerful coding agent. You can get a beefy server on Hetzner for less than $50/month, self-host all of that and run entirely on open source alternatives. This is on the same order of magnitude as the cost of your LLM subscription. You can (theoretically) have your whole IT operations costing you a few hundred bucks per month.

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isawczuk 14 days ago
1. Because there were no "free" support, unlike now GPTs can solve most problems without hiring expensive staff. 2. Companies payed millions on trainings specific to their solutions.
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