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by sandcat_ 4 days ago
This is just the old argument in favour of SaaS, though. The article is pointing out that those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.

At my job (we're somewhere in the transition between startup -> enterprise), we still use a lot of SaaS and are continuing to do so, but even there we're starting to move off certain platforms (Pendo, is a recent casualty) as we've realized in many cases we can just build it ourselves, pay drastically less, and actually get to control how it all works.

My suspicion, though I could be wrong: SaaS will move more and more towards focusing solely on the enterprise. Personal users and startups will have a harder time justifying both the cost and lack of flexibility of pure software SaaS. Enterprise will continue to be ok with paying the costs in exchange for compliance and vendor stuff and integration and whatever else they care about.

3 comments

Even if maintainance is just a Claude/ChatGPT session away we know that the cost of that session could be 1-2 hours of attention going to a supporting tool. And what if suddently is down? now your software team is having an incident about an in house tool instead if an incident about your paying customers.

Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.

> those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.

…as are your own, perfectly custom security vulnerabilities and their successful exploitations.

I think small, ma and pa businesses who don't know anything about software engineering will still need support.