I don't agree. Here are four reasons why public clouds don't automatically win. 1. Many companies operate multi-cloud and prefer vendors who cross platforms.

I don't agree. Here are four reasons why public clouds don't automatically win. 1. Many companies operate multi-cloud and prefer vendors who cross platforms. 2. SaaS companies don't compete with cloud vendors in a simple, head to head way. Instead they operate symbiotically. A SaaS on for analytics AWS might compete with Redshift but have joint go-to-market with EC2 with deep discounting of cloud costs as the vendor grows. AWS makes money either way. 3. Your margin argument is wrong. Gross margins for independent SaaS vendors that are infra heavy are more like 50-60% all in (including payments to AWS, GCP, etc.) You can bring them up by managing the infrastructure running in your customers' cloud accounts. You need to instead look at actual prices for competing SaaS services. They tend to be roughly comparable in the aggregate at least in the database markets I'm familiar with, because vendors charge what the market will bear. Instead, vendors compete on support, the billing model, and features. Public clouds don't have any particular advantage here. Just to give one example: Redshift offers deep discounts in return for 3 year prepayment. However, it can't handle the response time required by many customer-facing APIs. 4. The thing that screws up vendor finances is not cost of delivery (COGS) but customer acquisition costs (CAC). That's the principal reason why many of the big SaaS services are still underwater on profitability. My company is a SaaS vendor for ClickHouse. We've experienced all of these. Our business is doing fine.