8 ms·

SaaS is just vendor lock-in with better branding

222 points by pistoriusp 1y ago

dasil003 1y ago
The title is incongruous with the conclusion.
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  Curious about this. The usual argument is that hosting on Cloudflare is vendor lock-in, I am stating that picking _any_ SaaS induces vendor lock-in. > No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. The argument is that you might as well not "spend" those 5 taxes, just use the platform, and write the software.
  - yed 1y ago
    The title strongly implies that vendor lock-in is a bad thing (the phrase "lock-in" has a very much negative connotation), but then the article proposes that you should just give up and go all in on vendor lock-in with a proprietary platform. The alternative to vendor lock-in with SaaS would naturally be running standardized open-source or home grown solutions. That is what people who complain about vendor lock-in generally recommend, not SaaS. The article would be more clear if it addressed that.
    - pistoriusp 1y ago
      Ok, that's fair. I think I might have approached this from a typical JavaScript/ TypeScript developer - where using SaaS is the norm. I'm wondering what you developing in? Not wishing to invalidate your point, just curious?
      - yed 1y ago
        We're a Rails shop generally using basic Postgres + Redis with various Rails gems filling in where needed. Our needs aren't terribly complex though.
canadiantim 1y ago
Not if it’s open data and people can easily move their data between vendors
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  That's the dream right, how often is that true? Seems like this should be a leading indicator for picking a SaaS!
  - hiatus 1y ago
    This is a legal requirement of GDPR, no? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
    - pistoriusp 1y ago
      Edit: I am wrong. AFIAK GDPR only applies if you're profitable, otherwise a fine on revenue ... pre-revenue isn't applicable.
      - hiatus 1y ago
        I don't see anything about revenue here https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
        pistoriusp 1y ago
        You're right, I read it a few years ago, and my knowledge is incorrect. I thought the fine was only a percentage of revenue if you're above $10M, or something along those lines.
      - kavaruka 1y ago
        The GDPR always applies regardless of whether a company is profitable or not. But it covers only personal data/sensible data, not "all data".
gavmor 1y ago
The discovery tax is actually something like O(n log n), because you have to also search and also compare. It's part of The Mess We're In[0]. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
- roncesvalles 1y ago
  To some degree this happens if you're trying to optimize and find The Best solution for something that isn't core to your product's value proposition. Just take something that meets your requirements and you'll probably be fine. And if you need to switch to something else down the line then, oh well, pull a couple of all-nighters and get it done. Dealing with the ground shifting below you is part of the job.
missedthecue 1y ago
That's why there's so much of it. Annuity like income and pricing power is an attractive business model to create around.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
So the author is saying, don't buy SaaS, that's vendor lock-in. Instead just go all-in on one platform... like Cloudflare, the one (& only) platform that the SDK he writes works on. Which isn't vendor lock-in? No, wait, everything is vendor lock-in: No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. That's not what lock-in means. Just having a vendor-specific component or integration, is not the same thing as being locked-in to a vendor or integration. Locked-in means that switching it out for something else is either A) impossible, or B) would require an investment greater than just sticking with the existing thing. When you write software in a loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive way, the intersection between different components is designed to not take much work to replace one component or another. The same is true of systems. If the interfaces of those components are simple, and their use is cohesive, it should not be difficult to replace a part. However, if your components are not cohesive, then it will be a huge pain in the ass to replace anything. So, no, it's not a good idea to choose a platform because "everything is lock-in, so fuck it, i'll lock myself in even more!" As a developer, I can see the appeal, as it means less work for you. But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time.
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  > But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time. I agree with you. If you're starting out, if your business is not profitable, don't pick SaaS. Don't take the time and pay those 5 taxes. Rather just use the platform, and if you're scalable and profitable and growing, pick some other technology that supports you in the long run.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  for what its worth, I use cloudflare workers a lot and I write it in a way where my code can run on anywhere else (and heck, if you really want it, you could run the code locally using wrangler dev I suppose? ) But I guess my software can work with only some changes or I suppose even without some changes on pure node/bun/deno as well
lokimedes 1y ago
It is Adam Smith’s “rent seeking” in a modern hyper-scalable form. It should be shunned and criminalized on a basis of anti-social economics. Now the other extreme of free software is, arguably, also (economically) bad, as it fails to reward the effort of the creators proportionally to the value gained by the user. Let us buy our software, and separately, offer us a service agreement that actually has to provide value in its own right. The bundling of these in SaaS is what makes this obscene.
- mypornaccount 1y ago
  I sell my saas to willing buyers at the fair market price.
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    That’s not mutually exclusive with rent seeking, of course.
    - missedthecue 1y ago
      But rent seeking implies some sort of external party enforcing a non-competitive environment that benefits you. Like tariffs or aggressive zoning laws. Raising the price of your product isn't rent seeking.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        You're right, but software does find itself in a non-competitive environment thanks to a sea of intellectual property laws that benefit incumbents. That external party is ever-present, and no doubt implied in discussions here.
        theamk 1y ago
        Unless you mean copyright / trade-secrets specifically, then IP laws don't really help SaaS that much. For example take Google Workspace - email, calendar, docs. Google has no particular patents for those, and I've never heard about startups in this area not getting traction because of IP troubles. Same goes with Jira, or Github, or Slack, or AWS S3 - all of those don't have particularly many patents and in fact there are plenty of alternatives, self-hosted or otherwise. People still pay for them happily.
davidpaulyoung 1y ago
Use only open-source SaaS with the option to self-host.
- isaachinman 1y ago
  This is the way to go. Also has the added security bonus of keeping all your services in a private network, as opposed to exposing everything to the internet.
- aitchnyu 1y ago
  Sentry used to be easy to self-host. Gitlab used to be in apt repos. Guess we should have a self-hosting score based on how big is the docker compose file, version upgrade steps, memory usage etc.
  - vanschelven 1y ago
    as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815
AstroBen 1y ago
So to fight vendor lock in.. double down by locking yourself in even more, tying everything to one platform?
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  > locking yourself in even more, tying everything to one platform? I'm saying that if you don't want to use a platform because it's "lock-in," but then use SaaS... then the argument doesn't hold true, especially if you consider the "taxes" of using SaaS.
exiguus 1y ago
Consider using SaaS only for non-critical sectors where its discontinuation would not threaten your business's survival. Ensure you have alternatives in place, such as switching to another SaaS provider, self-hosting, or developing an in-house solution. I have witnessed companies fail because their core operations relied too heavily on a SaaS platform."
solatic 1y ago
OP isn't really arguing against SaaS (after all, OP recommends in the end either Cloudflare or Supabase, which are provided as a service...), that's just the clickbait title, rather OP is arguing against signing up for a hundred different vendors and the overhead of commercial relationships with a hundred different vendors. Which is... not really controversial. Fewer vendors makes your life easier. Fewer dependencies makes your life easier. It would be awesome if you could build your entire product based on the standard library alone! Sadly... that's not really realistic. Nice pipe-dream though.
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  Thanks! I think you summarized exactly what I was saying, and pointing out that I had a clickbait title. My goal here is if you're starting out with something new, consider reaching for a platform rather than a bunch of services. The reason why I really love Cloudflare is because of their bindings. A lot of the time you are simply using fetch, so request and response to interact with their services. It feels as if fetch has become like the Unix pipe of the web.
citizenpaul 1y ago
IMO Vendor lock in is when you ask your boss why cant we use tool NEWTHING? Then they tell you its because they have a 5 year contract with Oracle/MS/IBM/Salesforce and that is what we are going to use. We aren't going to have 10 platforms. Which means in 10 years they will really be locked in because no one is going to un-entrench that thing.
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  if you've made it to 10 years, that's a really nice problem to have (or maybe a really boring problem to have). But if you're just starting out, I want to prevent you from making all those decisions when you could really be focusing on your startup instead. So I'm trying to encourage you to consider picking a platform and just sticking with the tools of the platform rather than bundling it yourself together.
  - tough 1y ago
    You can stick with it without legally getting trapped by some shady BD getting their sales quota filled
    - citizenpaul 1y ago
      Or like how atlassian suddenly started charging a "serverless event" fee for their various workflow automation tasks a couple years ago basically slapping a $5-$10k markup on a product you already own. Thats just for small companies I'm sure there are enterprise customers that are paying six figures for a previously free feature and shrug it off. Like you said a good problem to have.
- pak9rabid 1y ago
  It's still a good idea to abstract away these services behind a standardized interface. This way switching from one service to another is just a matter of providing an alternative implementation to said interface. Granted this approach requires a little foresight...something many companies seem to not have nowadays.
paxys 1y ago
I'm at the stage of my career where vendor lock-in (aka "we are going to use this stable boring corporate-backed tech forever instead of migrating between your hot new JS frameworks every 6 months") is a godsend. Yes I'll happily use AWS. No I will not spend my time to learn and implement RedwoodSDK, whatever that is.
- tough 1y ago
  There's a RedwoodJS frontend framework, never heard of RedwoodSDK Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM
  - pistoriusp 1y ago
    RedwoodSDK is the successor to RedwoodJS. We've rebranded RedwoodJS as "Redwood GraphQL" and built this new thing from scratch. We are the same people with the same ambitions, but more focused. With a narrow niche. I believe that a framework requires a platform to be competitive today. Because of AI, the difficulty in writing code is greatly reduced. And because of platforms, the difficulty of shipping to production is greatly reduced. That combination can be really great for your velocity when trying to build a business.
    - tough 1y ago
      Thanks, that does make sense, I just hadn't heard about the new direction/rebranding. Agreed on both of your assesments Best of luck!
      - pistoriusp 1y ago
        Thank you! We're getting a lot of love! Just need to solve distribution. ;P
    - lazide 1y ago
      I can’t tell if serious or not, but I threw up in my mouth a little regardless.
nitwit005 1y ago
The real issues is that, 3 years down the line, they'll dramatically the price, and then raise the price again, and again. Because that's the incentive, particularly with products that are naturally fading and ceasing to make new sales.
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  Good point, I think I should add that to the article.
- Slartie 1y ago
  Don't forget that they'll change their API every so often, so you'll spend days and weeks to adapt to "v2" before "v1" is deprecated and eventually removed. You will usually get nothing in terms of desirable features for doing that work, quite often you will get new bugs instead that weren't present with the old API, or even worse, features you depend on are removed because "almost nobody really used them" or "they aren't a good fit in the new interface anymore", and of course you won't have the choice of simply keep using the old version of the thing for an arbitrary amount of time to perform that update on your own pace.
abelanger 1y ago
This reads more like a pitch for open-source than anything else. > Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. The point of something open-source and self-hosted is that it resolves nearly all of the "taxes" mentioned in the article. What the article refers to as the discovery, sign-up, integration, and local development tax are all easily solved by a good open-source local development story. The "production tax" (is tax the right word?) can be resolved by contributions or a good plugin/module ecosystem.
- roncesvalles 1y ago
  Open source is free if your time is worth nothing.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    some people just don't understand business people is gonna find out why companies pays top dollar for close source alternative vs open source product
antithesizer 1y ago
Saas, like streaming media generally, has always been a play to remove the control that comes with ownership from customers and keep it in the hands of big tech. Remember when they discontinued the iPod? It wasn't because people weren't buying.
- 9rx 1y ago
  Apple stopped breaking down iPod sales in 2014, but at that time sales were just 25% of what they were at its peak. By 2022, sales may not have been zero, but it was probably pretty close.
turnsout 1y ago
Ooh, are we just saying nonsense phrases now? How about “React is just race conditions with better branding”
klysm 1y ago
The important thing about vendor lock in is allowing another company to have pricing leverage over you.
jgord 1y ago
Perhaps the difference between a religion and a cult is that you can leave a religion. Likewise .. if you can get your data in a standard format and walk away, you are not locked-in. Customers tend to feel less aggrieved when they have access to their data - too many SaaS platforms dont allow this.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Really interesting. As someone who wants to monetize his side projects, I am not sure what I should do. Should I make it 1) open source under permissive license (MIT) 2) open source under restrictive license (AGPL/SSPL) 3) source available and only permissive if you pay me a license (like how redis did it in the middle but actually this time , instead of changing license after project is already famous, I do it from the start of the project) 4) not make its source available and distribute a binary for fixed one time. 5) I do any of the above things but with primarily supporting saas? and supporting the ability to move out as you mentioned Currently, most of my software that I write is just open sourced with MIT and I just private the software that I think has value.
  - jgord 1y ago
    I have similar questions - think open source funding is an important and unsolved problem. Under an ideal economy and politics, we might use taxation to fund OpenSource projects that are in the public interest : just as we used tax to build road, rail, bridges, and other widely used shared infrastructure. It would not be the end of competition or capitalism if we did this - similarly we should fund science and engineering research, and that could include funding development of OSS projects indirectly. I know YC say they invest in business models built around open source, and open source can work as a marketing sales funnel toward paid SaaS premium features. It would be nice to have some analytics on what hybrid OSS/SaaS biz models work well in practice.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Absolutely. Do hit me up if you find it as there definitely needs a mix b/w the morality and money for software since open source to me is a moral standpoint and I want to find the right mix I guess.
foundart 1y ago
With SaaS you mostly give away the chance to benefit from the near zero marginal cost of software. The vendor probably shares the benefit of the marginal cost via lower prices, but at some scale of users and some price per user, the SaaS customer will end up getting a bad deal. The problem is, you'd be foolish to run your own thing in the early days of a company. It's only when you've succeeded and scaled that it becomes a problem. You survived long enough to need to scale in part by keeping costs low and one way you did that was by using SaaS services instead of building and/or running versions of those tools yourself. That was smart. As the business grew at least one or two of those SaaS services got so entwined into the daily operations of your company that there is now no way to replace them without a lengthy, risky, and expensive migration project. The SaaS problem is a negative side effect of your success. edited - a typo and a word change
pjmlp 1y ago
SaaS is the solution to get devs to actually pay for tooling, like other professionals. Who doesn't like it, should promote that upstream gets more than bug reports and push requests, as means to pay their bills.
atoav 1y ago
Well SaaS enshittification is among the reasons why open source software is getting more popular. If you are curious why people are sceptical of subscription models look no further than Adobe. As a former freelancer most of the software I still pay for has a model in the form of: Pay 350 € once, get 2 years of updates and use it as long as you like. If you want new updates after you get a reduced price of 120 € for an extension period. This is my favourite license model for commercial software since it gives me maximum planability of my expenses and it gives the software company an incentives to add substentially useful features with new updates instead of just collecting rent.
bob1029 1y ago
Minimizing dependencies is probably close to the #1 thing you can do to improve the survivability of your product and business. In a prior role, I was responsible for figuring out the best way to deliver a docusign-style experience that integrated with our product. After having conversations with two of the biggest vendors (DocuSign/Adobe), we decided the constraints of their APIs were causing too much friction with how our product/customer wanted things to work. We went with a fully in-house solution. In most situations, trying to reinvent something like DocuSign is a terrible idea. In this case especially so since often you are using it simply because it is trusted (not because it is technically superior). In our case, the product was already installed and deeply trusted by the customers. They would have gone along with DocuSign, but they also had no problem with us doing it first-party. Ultimately, it was a lot of up front work to get this implemented, but the customer absolutely loves it. We had to make some minor tweaks to how it functioned and that really highlighted why this was a good path. If we had gone with DocuSign, Adobe, et. al., that minor tweak would have turned into a major refactor and hack around shitshow.
sophiabannet1 1y ago
Totally agree, SaaS often shifts complexity rather than removing it, integrated platforms feel like coding with training wheels off.

222 points by pistoriusp 1y ago

dasil003 1y ago

The title is incongruous with the conclusion.

pistoriusp 1y ago
Curious about this. The usual argument is that hosting on Cloudflare is vendor lock-in, I am stating that picking _any_ SaaS induces vendor lock-in. > No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. The argument is that you might as well not "spend" those 5 taxes, just use the platform, and write the software.
- yed 1y ago
  The title strongly implies that vendor lock-in is a bad thing (the phrase "lock-in" has a very much negative connotation), but then the article proposes that you should just give up and go all in on vendor lock-in with a proprietary platform. The alternative to vendor lock-in with SaaS would naturally be running standardized open-source or home grown solutions. That is what people who complain about vendor lock-in generally recommend, not SaaS. The article would be more clear if it addressed that.
  - pistoriusp 1y ago
    Ok, that's fair. I think I might have approached this from a typical JavaScript/ TypeScript developer - where using SaaS is the norm. I'm wondering what you developing in? Not wishing to invalidate your point, just curious?
    - yed 1y ago
      We're a Rails shop generally using basic Postgres + Redis with various Rails gems filling in where needed. Our needs aren't terribly complex though.

canadiantim 1y ago

Not if it’s open data and people can easily move their data between vendors

pistoriusp 1y ago
That's the dream right, how often is that true? Seems like this should be a leading indicator for picking a SaaS!
- hiatus 1y ago
  This is a legal requirement of GDPR, no? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
  - pistoriusp 1y ago
    Edit: I am wrong. AFIAK GDPR only applies if you're profitable, otherwise a fine on revenue ... pre-revenue isn't applicable.
    - hiatus 1y ago
      I don't see anything about revenue here https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
      - pistoriusp 1y ago
        You're right, I read it a few years ago, and my knowledge is incorrect. I thought the fine was only a percentage of revenue if you're above $10M, or something along those lines.
    - kavaruka 1y ago
      The GDPR always applies regardless of whether a company is profitable or not. But it covers only personal data/sensible data, not "all data".

gavmor 1y ago

The discovery tax is actually something like O(n log n), because you have to also search and also compare. It's part of The Mess We're In[0]. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

roncesvalles 1y ago
To some degree this happens if you're trying to optimize and find The Best solution for something that isn't core to your product's value proposition. Just take something that meets your requirements and you'll probably be fine. And if you need to switch to something else down the line then, oh well, pull a couple of all-nighters and get it done. Dealing with the ground shifting below you is part of the job.

missedthecue 1y ago

That's why there's so much of it. Annuity like income and pricing power is an attractive business model to create around.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

So the author is saying, don't buy SaaS, that's vendor lock-in. Instead just go all-in on one platform... like Cloudflare, the one (& only) platform that the SDK he writes works on. Which isn't vendor lock-in? No, wait, everything is vendor lock-in: No matter what choice you make, it's always going to be vendor-locked in. Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. That's not what lock-in means. Just having a vendor-specific component or integration, is not the same thing as being locked-in to a vendor or integration. Locked-in means that switching it out for something else is either A) impossible, or B) would require an investment greater than just sticking with the existing thing. When you write software in a loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive way, the intersection between different components is designed to not take much work to replace one component or another. The same is true of systems. If the interfaces of those components are simple, and their use is cohesive, it should not be difficult to replace a part. However, if your components are not cohesive, then it will be a huge pain in the ass to replace anything. So, no, it's not a good idea to choose a platform because "everything is lock-in, so fuck it, i'll lock myself in even more!" As a developer, I can see the appeal, as it means less work for you. But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time.

pistoriusp 1y ago
> But as a business owner, this is a stupid reason to choose a solution. Choose solutions that will support the business and give it flexibility to change over time. I agree with you. If you're starting out, if your business is not profitable, don't pick SaaS. Don't take the time and pay those 5 taxes. Rather just use the platform, and if you're scalable and profitable and growing, pick some other technology that supports you in the long run.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
for what its worth, I use cloudflare workers a lot and I write it in a way where my code can run on anywhere else (and heck, if you really want it, you could run the code locally using wrangler dev I suppose? ) But I guess my software can work with only some changes or I suppose even without some changes on pure node/bun/deno as well

lokimedes 1y ago

It is Adam Smith’s “rent seeking” in a modern hyper-scalable form. It should be shunned and criminalized on a basis of anti-social economics. Now the other extreme of free software is, arguably, also (economically) bad, as it fails to reward the effort of the creators proportionally to the value gained by the user. Let us buy our software, and separately, offer us a service agreement that actually has to provide value in its own right. The bundling of these in SaaS is what makes this obscene.

mypornaccount 1y ago
I sell my saas to willing buyers at the fair market price.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  That’s not mutually exclusive with rent seeking, of course.
  - missedthecue 1y ago
    But rent seeking implies some sort of external party enforcing a non-competitive environment that benefits you. Like tariffs or aggressive zoning laws. Raising the price of your product isn't rent seeking.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      You're right, but software does find itself in a non-competitive environment thanks to a sea of intellectual property laws that benefit incumbents. That external party is ever-present, and no doubt implied in discussions here.
      - theamk 1y ago
        Unless you mean copyright / trade-secrets specifically, then IP laws don't really help SaaS that much. For example take Google Workspace - email, calendar, docs. Google has no particular patents for those, and I've never heard about startups in this area not getting traction because of IP troubles. Same goes with Jira, or Github, or Slack, or AWS S3 - all of those don't have particularly many patents and in fact there are plenty of alternatives, self-hosted or otherwise. People still pay for them happily.

davidpaulyoung 1y ago

Use only open-source SaaS with the option to self-host.

isaachinman 1y ago
This is the way to go. Also has the added security bonus of keeping all your services in a private network, as opposed to exposing everything to the internet.
aitchnyu 1y ago
Sentry used to be easy to self-host. Gitlab used to be in apt repos. Guess we should have a self-hosting score based on how big is the docker compose file, version upgrade steps, memory usage etc.
- vanschelven 1y ago
  as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815

AstroBen 1y ago

So to fight vendor lock in.. double down by locking yourself in even more, tying everything to one platform?

pistoriusp 1y ago
> locking yourself in even more, tying everything to one platform? I'm saying that if you don't want to use a platform because it's "lock-in," but then use SaaS... then the argument doesn't hold true, especially if you consider the "taxes" of using SaaS.

exiguus 1y ago

Consider using SaaS only for non-critical sectors where its discontinuation would not threaten your business's survival. Ensure you have alternatives in place, such as switching to another SaaS provider, self-hosting, or developing an in-house solution. I have witnessed companies fail because their core operations relied too heavily on a SaaS platform."

solatic 1y ago

OP isn't really arguing against SaaS (after all, OP recommends in the end either Cloudflare or Supabase, which are provided as a service...), that's just the clickbait title, rather OP is arguing against signing up for a hundred different vendors and the overhead of commercial relationships with a hundred different vendors. Which is... not really controversial. Fewer vendors makes your life easier. Fewer dependencies makes your life easier. It would be awesome if you could build your entire product based on the standard library alone! Sadly... that's not really realistic. Nice pipe-dream though.

pistoriusp 1y ago
Thanks! I think you summarized exactly what I was saying, and pointing out that I had a clickbait title. My goal here is if you're starting out with something new, consider reaching for a platform rather than a bunch of services. The reason why I really love Cloudflare is because of their bindings. A lot of the time you are simply using fetch, so request and response to interact with their services. It feels as if fetch has become like the Unix pipe of the web.

citizenpaul 1y ago

IMO Vendor lock in is when you ask your boss why cant we use tool NEWTHING? Then they tell you its because they have a 5 year contract with Oracle/MS/IBM/Salesforce and that is what we are going to use. We aren't going to have 10 platforms. Which means in 10 years they will really be locked in because no one is going to un-entrench that thing.

pistoriusp 1y ago
if you've made it to 10 years, that's a really nice problem to have (or maybe a really boring problem to have). But if you're just starting out, I want to prevent you from making all those decisions when you could really be focusing on your startup instead. So I'm trying to encourage you to consider picking a platform and just sticking with the tools of the platform rather than bundling it yourself together.
- tough 1y ago
  You can stick with it without legally getting trapped by some shady BD getting their sales quota filled
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    Or like how atlassian suddenly started charging a "serverless event" fee for their various workflow automation tasks a couple years ago basically slapping a $5-$10k markup on a product you already own. Thats just for small companies I'm sure there are enterprise customers that are paying six figures for a previously free feature and shrug it off. Like you said a good problem to have.
pak9rabid 1y ago
It's still a good idea to abstract away these services behind a standardized interface. This way switching from one service to another is just a matter of providing an alternative implementation to said interface. Granted this approach requires a little foresight...something many companies seem to not have nowadays.

paxys 1y ago

I'm at the stage of my career where vendor lock-in (aka "we are going to use this stable boring corporate-backed tech forever instead of migrating between your hot new JS frameworks every 6 months") is a godsend. Yes I'll happily use AWS. No I will not spend my time to learn and implement RedwoodSDK, whatever that is.

tough 1y ago
There's a RedwoodJS frontend framework, never heard of RedwoodSDK Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM
- pistoriusp 1y ago
  RedwoodSDK is the successor to RedwoodJS. We've rebranded RedwoodJS as "Redwood GraphQL" and built this new thing from scratch. We are the same people with the same ambitions, but more focused. With a narrow niche. I believe that a framework requires a platform to be competitive today. Because of AI, the difficulty in writing code is greatly reduced. And because of platforms, the difficulty of shipping to production is greatly reduced. That combination can be really great for your velocity when trying to build a business.
  - tough 1y ago
    Thanks, that does make sense, I just hadn't heard about the new direction/rebranding. Agreed on both of your assesments Best of luck!
    - pistoriusp 1y ago
      Thank you! We're getting a lot of love! Just need to solve distribution. ;P
  - lazide 1y ago
    I can’t tell if serious or not, but I threw up in my mouth a little regardless.

nitwit005 1y ago

The real issues is that, 3 years down the line, they'll dramatically the price, and then raise the price again, and again. Because that's the incentive, particularly with products that are naturally fading and ceasing to make new sales.

pistoriusp 1y ago
Good point, I think I should add that to the article.
Slartie 1y ago
Don't forget that they'll change their API every so often, so you'll spend days and weeks to adapt to "v2" before "v1" is deprecated and eventually removed. You will usually get nothing in terms of desirable features for doing that work, quite often you will get new bugs instead that weren't present with the old API, or even worse, features you depend on are removed because "almost nobody really used them" or "they aren't a good fit in the new interface anymore", and of course you won't have the choice of simply keep using the old version of the thing for an arbitrary amount of time to perform that update on your own pace.

abelanger 1y ago

This reads more like a pitch for open-source than anything else. > Switching out something, even if it's open source and self-hosted, means that you're rewriting a lot of code. The point of something open-source and self-hosted is that it resolves nearly all of the "taxes" mentioned in the article. What the article refers to as the discovery, sign-up, integration, and local development tax are all easily solved by a good open-source local development story. The "production tax" (is tax the right word?) can be resolved by contributions or a good plugin/module ecosystem.

roncesvalles 1y ago
Open source is free if your time is worth nothing.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  some people just don't understand business people is gonna find out why companies pays top dollar for close source alternative vs open source product

antithesizer 1y ago

Saas, like streaming media generally, has always been a play to remove the control that comes with ownership from customers and keep it in the hands of big tech. Remember when they discontinued the iPod? It wasn't because people weren't buying.

9rx 1y ago
Apple stopped breaking down iPod sales in 2014, but at that time sales were just 25% of what they were at its peak. By 2022, sales may not have been zero, but it was probably pretty close.

turnsout 1y ago

Ooh, are we just saying nonsense phrases now? How about “React is just race conditions with better branding”

klysm 1y ago

The important thing about vendor lock in is allowing another company to have pricing leverage over you.

jgord 1y ago

Perhaps the difference between a religion and a cult is that you can leave a religion. Likewise .. if you can get your data in a standard format and walk away, you are not locked-in. Customers tend to feel less aggrieved when they have access to their data - too many SaaS platforms dont allow this.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Really interesting. As someone who wants to monetize his side projects, I am not sure what I should do. Should I make it 1) open source under permissive license (MIT) 2) open source under restrictive license (AGPL/SSPL) 3) source available and only permissive if you pay me a license (like how redis did it in the middle but actually this time , instead of changing license after project is already famous, I do it from the start of the project) 4) not make its source available and distribute a binary for fixed one time. 5) I do any of the above things but with primarily supporting saas? and supporting the ability to move out as you mentioned Currently, most of my software that I write is just open sourced with MIT and I just private the software that I think has value.
- jgord 1y ago
  I have similar questions - think open source funding is an important and unsolved problem. Under an ideal economy and politics, we might use taxation to fund OpenSource projects that are in the public interest : just as we used tax to build road, rail, bridges, and other widely used shared infrastructure. It would not be the end of competition or capitalism if we did this - similarly we should fund science and engineering research, and that could include funding development of OSS projects indirectly. I know YC say they invest in business models built around open source, and open source can work as a marketing sales funnel toward paid SaaS premium features. It would be nice to have some analytics on what hybrid OSS/SaaS biz models work well in practice.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Absolutely. Do hit me up if you find it as there definitely needs a mix b/w the morality and money for software since open source to me is a moral standpoint and I want to find the right mix I guess.

foundart 1y ago

With SaaS you mostly give away the chance to benefit from the near zero marginal cost of software. The vendor probably shares the benefit of the marginal cost via lower prices, but at some scale of users and some price per user, the SaaS customer will end up getting a bad deal. The problem is, you'd be foolish to run your own thing in the early days of a company. It's only when you've succeeded and scaled that it becomes a problem. You survived long enough to need to scale in part by keeping costs low and one way you did that was by using SaaS services instead of building and/or running versions of those tools yourself. That was smart. As the business grew at least one or two of those SaaS services got so entwined into the daily operations of your company that there is now no way to replace them without a lengthy, risky, and expensive migration project. The SaaS problem is a negative side effect of your success. edited - a typo and a word change

pjmlp 1y ago

SaaS is the solution to get devs to actually pay for tooling, like other professionals. Who doesn't like it, should promote that upstream gets more than bug reports and push requests, as means to pay their bills.

atoav 1y ago

Well SaaS enshittification is among the reasons why open source software is getting more popular. If you are curious why people are sceptical of subscription models look no further than Adobe. As a former freelancer most of the software I still pay for has a model in the form of: Pay 350 € once, get 2 years of updates and use it as long as you like. If you want new updates after you get a reduced price of 120 € for an extension period. This is my favourite license model for commercial software since it gives me maximum planability of my expenses and it gives the software company an incentives to add substentially useful features with new updates instead of just collecting rent.

bob1029 1y ago

Minimizing dependencies is probably close to the #1 thing you can do to improve the survivability of your product and business. In a prior role, I was responsible for figuring out the best way to deliver a docusign-style experience that integrated with our product. After having conversations with two of the biggest vendors (DocuSign/Adobe), we decided the constraints of their APIs were causing too much friction with how our product/customer wanted things to work. We went with a fully in-house solution. In most situations, trying to reinvent something like DocuSign is a terrible idea. In this case especially so since often you are using it simply because it is trusted (not because it is technically superior). In our case, the product was already installed and deeply trusted by the customers. They would have gone along with DocuSign, but they also had no problem with us doing it first-party. Ultimately, it was a lot of up front work to get this implemented, but the customer absolutely loves it. We had to make some minor tweaks to how it functioned and that really highlighted why this was a good path. If we had gone with DocuSign, Adobe, et. al., that minor tweak would have turned into a major refactor and hack around shitshow.

sophiabannet1 1y ago

Totally agree, SaaS often shifts complexity rather than removing it, integrated platforms feel like coding with training wheels off.