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There's a lot of things, but at the end of the day its marketing, and ensuring you challenge your customers to think about what really matters: 1. You, as a de
by zeeg 10y ago
There's a lot of things, but at the end of the day its marketing, and ensuring you challenge your customers to think about what really matters:
1. You, as a developer, care about open source and want to fund it.
2. You, as a business, don't want to run more infrastructure.
3. You, as a business, care about expenses (and SaaS is cheaper).
4. You, as a developer or business, want the latest and greatest version all the time, and on-premise is not tailored to that.
(there are certainly more, but this is just some quick ones that come to mind)
For us a lot of these things come more easily as Sentry requires Serious Infrastructure(tm) unless you're a tiny little side project. If you are a tiny little side project, you can just use our SaaS for free.
Now on the counter side, the biggest reason you host it internally is compliance. Thats not usually legal compliance these days, but its more about controlling liability, or because you (usually incorrectly) think you are better at securing systems than other people. This has been shifting for a while with the rapid rise of AWS, and the time is absolutely right to focus on SaaS.
- fiatjaf 10y agoIf SaaS is cheaper, then that's the only argument we need. But it isn't clear that SaaS is cheaper. I run a small SaaS thing for which I charge $19/mo from a dozen clients. Each one of these clients could run it for $7 on Heroku. Someone could easily write a "Deploy to Heroku" button in no time. I also thought about the free plan Sentry.io offers. That, as you said, eliminates all the small projects need to host themselves, but (I'm guessing) it isn't something that all companies can afford: offering so generous free plans. I want to open-source it, but I'm afraid I'll lose all my income.
- LewisJEllis 10y agoYou're either ignoring the cost of engineering time, or you're underestimating the engineering time your clients might spend running their own instance. With the numbers you give, running your service themselves would save them $150/yr. That's 2-3 engineer hours per year to keep it running, keep it updated, keep it secure, and troubleshoot if things go wrong. If they spend more than 2-3 hours per year, they spent more on the engineering time than they would have paying you. This is even ignoring questions like "can that $7 heroku box handle the same load as your $19 plan?" or "do your clients even know how to set up/manage Heroku?" Of course, people underestimate this effort/its potential complications, and overestimate their own abilities, so they often think this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but in reality it's usually not.