8 ms·

The Great SaaS Gaslight

90 points by unworkableideas 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
fidotron 11mo ago
The elephant in the room: piracy.
- drob518 11mo ago
  Indeed. The SaaS model allowed the software companies to have perfect control of their users. You might pay more and have unused accounts, but you’ll never pay less. It also was great for adoption because there was nothing to install. Salesforce was notorious for selling to penetrating an account by selling to individual sales people, then to sales teams, then sales departments, and only when everyone was already using it to the rest of the company and IT departments. The sales person could get started with a single account using a corporate credit card. Then, once hooked, there was value in getting a whole team onboard, etc. it was really brilliant.
- MontyCarloHall 11mo ago
  It’s a bitter monkey paw irony: when you ask FOSS advocates how developers would be paid in a fully FOSS world where piracy cannot exist because all software is free, the answer is often “service contracts.” The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.
  - deadbabe 11mo ago
    There is still open source software, and it is still as free as ever.
    - pjmlp 11mo ago
      And routinely gets license changed as the authors discover they actually need to make money in a capitalist world.
      - deadbabe 11mo ago
        FOSS is a bad way to make money, but it is a great way for independently wealthy developers to get clout.
      - timka 11mo ago
        It's the Westphalian system which includes not only (protestant) capitalism, but also scientific positivism, liberal humanism and everything else. Which we now call (post-/meta-)modern. There's nothing we can do about all that and for practical reasons we just accept the world as is and tend to forget/ignore the reasons it is so. But for retaining cognitive sovereignty if think it's good to remember that.
  - fidotron 11mo ago
    > Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever. Indeed, and that software ends up optimized for service contract billing potential over usability.
- cnnlives69 11mo ago
  I worked for a startup company that built and hosted our own custom systems, which were fairly specific to our company and production needs. Our production manager no longer wanted to pay for internal development, so he asked for a demo of a SaaS product from a Chinese company that sounded similar to ours. It turned out that they already had our source code, likely from a Chinese contractor that worked with our team a few years prior, because the product they were selling was almost exactly the same. While we could not prove anything, it would seem that intellectual property theft just happens. Today, we use tools daily that probably function because of intellectual property theft. While this is traumatic to me, if I really try to be objective, aside from the additional theft of art, I don’t see how this is much different than what RMS and FSF stood for. Data finds a way to free itself.
  - cindyllm 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - port11 11mo ago
    The incentives were always misaligned, with having some code be free (open) and free (gratis), but the underlying system being value-extraction growth-obsessed capitalism. If processed food was sold for a profit based off farmers selling their produce for free, I don't know… the analogy makes me shiver. Somehow we expect FLOSS coders and maintainers to do all this free labour to keep companies from paying the True Cost of everything. Externalities, externalities… If I ever start another business, I hope I can set aside enough cash to support for the primary open-source tools that we depend on.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  Was piracy a big problem in the enterprise world (which SaaS focuses on)? My understanding is that piracy is a big no-no for businesses. Nobody bothered to go after consumers but business is a different story.
  - tjpnz 11mo ago
    Not especially in the developed world, but everywhere else it was rampant. I suspect one of the things pushing this business model was the ability to extract some profit from regions which would otherwise be paying zilch.
  - physicsguy 11mo ago
    Yes. I worked for a large company who made engineering software and we had all sorts of license checks that would ping our servers when an unlicensed copy pinged up. We regularly found IPs linked to large companies using it and the licensing team regularly had a field day. Universities basically got a stern letter because there is no money in chasing those, but large companies certainly got contacted by licensing compliance.
- timka 11mo ago
  While reading the Fundamentals of Data-Engineering I noticed that one of the most practically interesting parts, data extraction/acquisition, is essentially skipped. The author just noted its 'grayness'. That is web scraping is the SaaS form of 'piracy'.
smitty1e 11mo ago
> Software keeps iterating on solving the same soluble problems because the remaining challenges are really difficult to solve with technology. Communication and coordination are full of nuance and subtleties that defy digitization. Software will never, ever be more than mechanism. Peak software is when it fades into the background, and focus stays on the task at hand.
- intrasight 11mo ago
  It'll be AI focusing on the task at hand. But I guess we'll change it to "the task at prompt".
pelagicAustral 11mo ago
In my humble opinion, great software, and the ideal to work on is unachievable, because it is great software built in house to solve the house problems, not anybody else's problems, sure you can start with a solid base, but in the end every organisation and every department inside this organisation has their own requirements. Of course we can't pretend that each business, or government institution is going to be able to have a handful of full stacks around just to keep up with the business requirements, but in reality, if that was the case, thing would operate much more smoothly. Software for the masses is another category completely separate from anything that is going to help you achieve more at work, social media is an example and I think AI to a large extent is the same, since a generic gpt, one without knowledge of the past and present of your organisation, deeply ingrained in your culture will also fail to provide that particular set of knowledge that you can call invaluable for your use case.
- tomrod 11mo ago
  And then, Excel exists as a philosophical counterpoint. As well as runs most businesses.
blfr 11mo ago
A good enough solution on par with the competition is exactly the right choice for a business 95+% of the time though. Your company probably shouldn't compete on email/calendar/vpn/filesharing/OS/spreadsheets/CRM/reporting... all of these are great as SaaS. And Google Workspace is a vastly superior solution to its predecessor offline or semi-online office suites, allows live collaboration and works across devices. Hubspot has a real, usable mobile app. Even Power BI is a step up from whatever pile of excels used to pass as reporting.
- Forgeties79 11mo ago
  HubSpot’s mobile app is so buggy for me. Anytime i’m tagged on a ticket comment I have to open the app first then click the link to it or it just opens the app and does nothing. Overall it works pretty well but I don’t know. It feels kind of clunky, especially with all the information it presents. Admittedly I don’t know how they can get all that information cleanly on a small screen, so I’m not really blaming them. It’s just been my experience
- ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
  You are talking about paying per user rent to access software we figured out how to build well thirty years ago. Nobody should pay rent for an office suite.
  - blfr 11mo ago
    We didn't figure it out then though. I used office suits 15 years ago. They didn't work like Workspace or even m365 today. You needed to sync files by yourself, sharing and access control were rudimentary at best. Most importantly, there was no way to support my currently bog standard workflow of making docs and notes on a computer, sharing it with colleagues in a chat with a simple link, where 2-3 people can edit it at the same time, and then checking out their changes or referring back to the notes on a phone. Not to mention stuff like presenting a deck directly into an online meeting where participants can browse ahead or look through the slides back. All of that is easily worth $10/seat/mo in productivity and would be very difficult to configure not as a service.
gethly 11mo ago
I would not say SaaS is a problem in itself(I built and run one myself). Software as a Service simply means that you can run an application on a remote machine, which you do not have to manage yourself and can pay only for what you need. That makes perfect financial sense. The problem with SaaS today is that the subscription-based model is getting out of hand - the value proposition no longer makes sense, in many cases. And secondly, vendor lock-in. You cannot get your data out. Or if you can, you will be less likely able to migrate to another provider or local application which means there is no free market where various providers can compete with better features, customer support, availability or price. Therefore, in the end the provider will hold you hostage via your own data. This is, after all, Amazon AWS's famous moat. It is often very expensive and painful to migrate into some in-house solution. And often it is simply not possible at all as it might require such a massive rewrites of your own application(understand as dependency on the provider), that it is not in the realm of possibility. So with like everything else, you are responsible for your own choices and if you make a bad judgement, like tying yourself to one provider, that is all on you. People keep yapping about monopolies in tech, yet they vehemently dislike decentralisation or taking care of their own stuff and want to have all the things on one place. But when things do not work out as they wanted, then these monopolies become a problem that is too late to mitigate. tl;dr do not use SaaS of mission-critical functionality and you'll be fine.
- lisbbb 11mo ago
  One of the worst vendor lock ins that I was shocked to find was AWS Amplify. What a total piece of crap!
fadvibe 11mo ago
I’ll be glad when this brief interlude of “OMG AWS go down! We stupid? Cloud bad?” posts are over and we go back to normalcy. Yes, we never needed the cloud. We could’ve kept the servers onsite or in data centers like we used to and pay much less to do much more. I worked in a startup that had hundreds of servers, and that was enough, and that served phones from cellular customers and mobile devices from some major cellular companies and media companies. Not many IT staff were needed for that and as devs we never had to think of how it was hosted, even though I did from my former experience. Now, when I develop, I have to have at least a basic understanding of AWS since our production code is built and hosted there. We have so many risks now. We can’t even use a package manager without worrying about secrets being stolen. We give away our secrets and code to an LLM that knows our intellectual property before we do, because it’s creating it. Development has been an increasing dystopia from the beginning. I don’t know if you’ve seen Silo, but if you have look at the monochrome graphical fileserver-ish UX that they use in the first season. I love that. I wish our shit were like that. But no. Instead we keep developing features no one asked for requiring new expensive equipment. Our aging parents can’t even operate a TV because instead of an on/off switch with volume and channel buttons, it’s either a complex UI or a cable box/TV combo with input selection- what is HDMI 1? They don’t know.
nizbit 11mo ago
Don’t forget the tiers where security is held for ransom!
- gruez 11mo ago
  You mean SSO? I think that's slightly disingenuous because it's still possible to be perfectly secure with username/password login. Sure, having SSO might prevent Barbra from accounting (who failed the last 3 phishing training sessions) from getting phished, but that's the company's problem, not the vendor's.
  - JimDabell 11mo ago
    When a person leaves an organisation, it’s difficult to find all the various team accounts they have been added to in order to remove them. So you end up in a situation where people no longer in the organisation frequently still have access to anything non-SSO. That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it?
    - gruez 11mo ago
      >When a person leaves an organisation, it’s difficult to find all the various team accounts they have been added to in order to remove them. Again, that's inconvenient but doable, just like phishing prevention. >That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it? I'm not denying it's a security issue, any more than I'm denying that phishing isn't a security issue. I even specifically mentioned the possibility of employees that fail phishing training. I'm objecting specifically to the "ransom" framing, which is a pejorative way to imply that companies have a duty to offer all security features for free.
punnerud 11mo ago
For smaller projects I actually started to like to vibe code in PHP; API, user login (magic links), webpages etc. Stable, lower maintenance, faster iterations etc. Now its really fun to build.
eterm 11mo ago
Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software. You might grumble about $30/mo for something like Postman, and it's true that "back in the day" it might have been a $40 one-off, but that's closer to $90 with inflation now, and there's a good chance that would have only bought you version 4. Then next year version 5 comes out, and you face a dilemma. Do you pay all over again? Do you end up staying on version 4 until eventually there's a compelling reason to upgrade? SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version. Software is economically expensive to produce, we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do.
- paulryanrogers 11mo ago
  Shrink wrapped software also often had cheaper upgrade packages, so you didn't always have to pay the full price each year. And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. As for FOSS going unpaid. SaaS doesn't necessarily lead to FOSS contributors getting paid more than they would if their software was going into shrink wrapped products.
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. So... nothing from this century? I'm not even sure how software without activation/licensing would work out economically. You'd either need something like a CD/dongle check (which is a hassle/expensive), or accept that one copy is going to be endlessly passed around.
    - deleted 11mo ago
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    - skydhash 11mo ago
      Bought a lot of licenses for software on macOS. Some notable ones are Alfred and Things 3. I have a license for two of the Affinity (Designer and Photos) suite and a not so old version of Parallel. Most people don't really pass the license around. And it's not that much if you're a professional. But most subscriptions prices are egregious.
deleted 11mo ago
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stavros 11mo ago
There's only one reason for this: You aren't the customer, so your incentives aren't aligned with the vendor's. Your data is being sold to other companies, so you getting value out of the software is only necessary insofar as it keeps you there. That's not where the vendor makes their money. Classic enshittification. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to evade it.
photochemsyn 11mo ago
Imagine if compilers were only available via the SaaS model. Developers and the tech community in general would never accept this, and compilers were open sourced well before the internet had developed to the point where it would even be possible. Nobody would trust a system that sent their proprietary code off to a data center to be compiled to binaries for their platform on a monthly subscription model - the idea is ludicrous. Currently the only SaaS product that still makes sense are LLMs, but this is temporary - anyone with sense realizes that the ideal situation is to run an open-source LLM model locally and privately, but this still requires a significant investment in high-end hardware and IT technical people. That's the basic calculation: is it overall more efficient and less expensive to hire a skilled IT team to manage your in-house solutions, mostly open-source, including security patches, than it is to rely on external providers who charge high monthly fees and use all manner of sneaky tactics to keep you locked into their products? The latter is going to win in the long run.
kumarvvr 11mo ago
For products like Photoshop and AutoCAD, it would have been great to have the option to use it for a few months and stop. This way, I can subscribe when work is available and I can offset cost by earnings. Of course, I am speaking as a freelancer. However, what I understand is that this level of on and off of subscription is very difficult.
- GaryBluto 11mo ago
  I bought a copy of Photoshop 6.0 (2000) a few months ago for use on a modern computer. Works fine, has (almost) all the features of modern Photoshop, zero DRM with the exception of an easily saved serial number. One time purchase.
ryanrasti 11mo ago
The fundamental SaaS lock-in comes from bundling two things: 1. A declarative, stable interface 2. An expert support/ops team I think the path forward is to unbundle them. We're already solving #1. Nix has the best potential to become that declarative & stable layer, letting us reach the goal of treating cloud providers as the simple commodities they should be (I wrote about this approach here: https://ryanrasti.com/blog/why-nix-will-win/ https://ryanrasti.com/blog/why-nix-will-win/) The bigger, unsolved question is #2: how to build a viable business model around self-hosted, unbundled support? That's the critical next step. My hunch is the solution is also technical, but it hasn't been built yet.
lisbbb 11mo ago
My beef with SaaS is that every client I went to just wanted developers who would glue together these solutions and they would invariably have puzzling overlaps in the products they purchased, particularly around CI/CD pipelines. I would be like "why does this go to this other service then deploy? You know it can just deploy from there, right?" And they would invariably say that "so and so made us buy that other service for their department so we're all standardizing around it, end of story." So you can never consolidate anything and it all just ends up as madness glued together with some Python. And writing that "glue" is shitty work and I can't believe how much they paid for me to do it. I very much resent the subscription model--it is terrible for the consumer and it's crept into everything and it's just disgusting.
robocat 11mo ago
Too one-sided to be a useful article. Negatives need to be balanced against positives. B2B SaaS can have some really great advantages for clients. It is best if the market is somewhat competitive (say payroll) to help prevent vendors from upping prices too much. The vendor wants to keep clients, avoiding churn. So the vendor is incentivised to keep the product current, and often add features for free. In a non-SaaS model, the product remains as delivered, or requires version upgrades or maintenance contracts (usually crappy). SaaS can have cheap upfront costs especially if designed for easy onboarding, and often you can quit easily (low sunken costs). Old-school software delivery is regularly a nightmare, and over budget because the vendor is incentivised to take money from their clients. Tht buyer needs to choose their compromises. I worked for a payroll software company with a product that ran on Windows, and they regularly screwed over clients because there was no alignment of incentives.
ireflect 11mo ago
This entire blog really resonates. I don't take it all literally, but it is funny and insightful and dark and poetic and accurate in many ways. More weird stuff like this please.
- unworkableideas 11mo ago
  Thanks for the encouragement, I will try to continue being weird.
irishmanlondon 11mo ago
[dead]

deleted 11mo ago

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fidotron 11mo ago

The elephant in the room: piracy.

drob518 11mo ago
Indeed. The SaaS model allowed the software companies to have perfect control of their users. You might pay more and have unused accounts, but you’ll never pay less. It also was great for adoption because there was nothing to install. Salesforce was notorious for selling to penetrating an account by selling to individual sales people, then to sales teams, then sales departments, and only when everyone was already using it to the rest of the company and IT departments. The sales person could get started with a single account using a corporate credit card. Then, once hooked, there was value in getting a whole team onboard, etc. it was really brilliant.
MontyCarloHall 11mo ago
It’s a bitter monkey paw irony: when you ask FOSS advocates how developers would be paid in a fully FOSS world where piracy cannot exist because all software is free, the answer is often “service contracts.” The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.
- deadbabe 11mo ago
  There is still open source software, and it is still as free as ever.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    And routinely gets license changed as the authors discover they actually need to make money in a capitalist world.
    - deadbabe 11mo ago
      FOSS is a bad way to make money, but it is a great way for independently wealthy developers to get clout.
    - timka 11mo ago
      It's the Westphalian system which includes not only (protestant) capitalism, but also scientific positivism, liberal humanism and everything else. Which we now call (post-/meta-)modern. There's nothing we can do about all that and for practical reasons we just accept the world as is and tend to forget/ignore the reasons it is so. But for retaining cognitive sovereignty if think it's good to remember that.
- fidotron 11mo ago
  > Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever. Indeed, and that software ends up optimized for service contract billing potential over usability.
cnnlives69 11mo ago
I worked for a startup company that built and hosted our own custom systems, which were fairly specific to our company and production needs. Our production manager no longer wanted to pay for internal development, so he asked for a demo of a SaaS product from a Chinese company that sounded similar to ours. It turned out that they already had our source code, likely from a Chinese contractor that worked with our team a few years prior, because the product they were selling was almost exactly the same. While we could not prove anything, it would seem that intellectual property theft just happens. Today, we use tools daily that probably function because of intellectual property theft. While this is traumatic to me, if I really try to be objective, aside from the additional theft of art, I don’t see how this is much different than what RMS and FSF stood for. Data finds a way to free itself.
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
- port11 11mo ago
  The incentives were always misaligned, with having some code be free (open) and free (gratis), but the underlying system being value-extraction growth-obsessed capitalism. If processed food was sold for a profit based off farmers selling their produce for free, I don't know… the analogy makes me shiver. Somehow we expect FLOSS coders and maintainers to do all this free labour to keep companies from paying the True Cost of everything. Externalities, externalities… If I ever start another business, I hope I can set aside enough cash to support for the primary open-source tools that we depend on.
Nextgrid 11mo ago
Was piracy a big problem in the enterprise world (which SaaS focuses on)? My understanding is that piracy is a big no-no for businesses. Nobody bothered to go after consumers but business is a different story.
- tjpnz 11mo ago
  Not especially in the developed world, but everywhere else it was rampant. I suspect one of the things pushing this business model was the ability to extract some profit from regions which would otherwise be paying zilch.
- physicsguy 11mo ago
  Yes. I worked for a large company who made engineering software and we had all sorts of license checks that would ping our servers when an unlicensed copy pinged up. We regularly found IPs linked to large companies using it and the licensing team regularly had a field day. Universities basically got a stern letter because there is no money in chasing those, but large companies certainly got contacted by licensing compliance.
timka 11mo ago
While reading the Fundamentals of Data-Engineering I noticed that one of the most practically interesting parts, data extraction/acquisition, is essentially skipped. The author just noted its 'grayness'. That is web scraping is the SaaS form of 'piracy'.

smitty1e 11mo ago

> Software keeps iterating on solving the same soluble problems because the remaining challenges are really difficult to solve with technology. Communication and coordination are full of nuance and subtleties that defy digitization. Software will never, ever be more than mechanism. Peak software is when it fades into the background, and focus stays on the task at hand.

intrasight 11mo ago
It'll be AI focusing on the task at hand. But I guess we'll change it to "the task at prompt".

pelagicAustral 11mo ago

In my humble opinion, great software, and the ideal to work on is unachievable, because it is great software built in house to solve the house problems, not anybody else's problems, sure you can start with a solid base, but in the end every organisation and every department inside this organisation has their own requirements. Of course we can't pretend that each business, or government institution is going to be able to have a handful of full stacks around just to keep up with the business requirements, but in reality, if that was the case, thing would operate much more smoothly. Software for the masses is another category completely separate from anything that is going to help you achieve more at work, social media is an example and I think AI to a large extent is the same, since a generic gpt, one without knowledge of the past and present of your organisation, deeply ingrained in your culture will also fail to provide that particular set of knowledge that you can call invaluable for your use case.

tomrod 11mo ago
And then, Excel exists as a philosophical counterpoint. As well as runs most businesses.

blfr 11mo ago

A good enough solution on par with the competition is exactly the right choice for a business 95+% of the time though. Your company probably shouldn't compete on email/calendar/vpn/filesharing/OS/spreadsheets/CRM/reporting... all of these are great as SaaS. And Google Workspace is a vastly superior solution to its predecessor offline or semi-online office suites, allows live collaboration and works across devices. Hubspot has a real, usable mobile app. Even Power BI is a step up from whatever pile of excels used to pass as reporting.

Forgeties79 11mo ago
HubSpot’s mobile app is so buggy for me. Anytime i’m tagged on a ticket comment I have to open the app first then click the link to it or it just opens the app and does nothing. Overall it works pretty well but I don’t know. It feels kind of clunky, especially with all the information it presents. Admittedly I don’t know how they can get all that information cleanly on a small screen, so I’m not really blaming them. It’s just been my experience
ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
You are talking about paying per user rent to access software we figured out how to build well thirty years ago. Nobody should pay rent for an office suite.
- blfr 11mo ago
  We didn't figure it out then though. I used office suits 15 years ago. They didn't work like Workspace or even m365 today. You needed to sync files by yourself, sharing and access control were rudimentary at best. Most importantly, there was no way to support my currently bog standard workflow of making docs and notes on a computer, sharing it with colleagues in a chat with a simple link, where 2-3 people can edit it at the same time, and then checking out their changes or referring back to the notes on a phone. Not to mention stuff like presenting a deck directly into an online meeting where participants can browse ahead or look through the slides back. All of that is easily worth $10/seat/mo in productivity and would be very difficult to configure not as a service.

gethly 11mo ago

I would not say SaaS is a problem in itself(I built and run one myself). Software as a Service simply means that you can run an application on a remote machine, which you do not have to manage yourself and can pay only for what you need. That makes perfect financial sense. The problem with SaaS today is that the subscription-based model is getting out of hand - the value proposition no longer makes sense, in many cases. And secondly, vendor lock-in. You cannot get your data out. Or if you can, you will be less likely able to migrate to another provider or local application which means there is no free market where various providers can compete with better features, customer support, availability or price. Therefore, in the end the provider will hold you hostage via your own data. This is, after all, Amazon AWS's famous moat. It is often very expensive and painful to migrate into some in-house solution. And often it is simply not possible at all as it might require such a massive rewrites of your own application(understand as dependency on the provider), that it is not in the realm of possibility. So with like everything else, you are responsible for your own choices and if you make a bad judgement, like tying yourself to one provider, that is all on you. People keep yapping about monopolies in tech, yet they vehemently dislike decentralisation or taking care of their own stuff and want to have all the things on one place. But when things do not work out as they wanted, then these monopolies become a problem that is too late to mitigate. tl;dr do not use SaaS of mission-critical functionality and you'll be fine.

lisbbb 11mo ago
One of the worst vendor lock ins that I was shocked to find was AWS Amplify. What a total piece of crap!

fadvibe 11mo ago

I’ll be glad when this brief interlude of “OMG AWS go down! We stupid? Cloud bad?” posts are over and we go back to normalcy. Yes, we never needed the cloud. We could’ve kept the servers onsite or in data centers like we used to and pay much less to do much more. I worked in a startup that had hundreds of servers, and that was enough, and that served phones from cellular customers and mobile devices from some major cellular companies and media companies. Not many IT staff were needed for that and as devs we never had to think of how it was hosted, even though I did from my former experience. Now, when I develop, I have to have at least a basic understanding of AWS since our production code is built and hosted there. We have so many risks now. We can’t even use a package manager without worrying about secrets being stolen. We give away our secrets and code to an LLM that knows our intellectual property before we do, because it’s creating it. Development has been an increasing dystopia from the beginning. I don’t know if you’ve seen Silo, but if you have look at the monochrome graphical fileserver-ish UX that they use in the first season. I love that. I wish our shit were like that. But no. Instead we keep developing features no one asked for requiring new expensive equipment. Our aging parents can’t even operate a TV because instead of an on/off switch with volume and channel buttons, it’s either a complex UI or a cable box/TV combo with input selection- what is HDMI 1? They don’t know.

nizbit 11mo ago

Don’t forget the tiers where security is held for ransom!

gruez 11mo ago
You mean SSO? I think that's slightly disingenuous because it's still possible to be perfectly secure with username/password login. Sure, having SSO might prevent Barbra from accounting (who failed the last 3 phishing training sessions) from getting phished, but that's the company's problem, not the vendor's.
- JimDabell 11mo ago
  When a person leaves an organisation, it’s difficult to find all the various team accounts they have been added to in order to remove them. So you end up in a situation where people no longer in the organisation frequently still have access to anything non-SSO. That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it?
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >When a person leaves an organisation, it’s difficult to find all the various team accounts they have been added to in order to remove them. Again, that's inconvenient but doable, just like phishing prevention. >That’s a very obvious, legitimate security issue, why are you accusing people of being insincere about it? I'm not denying it's a security issue, any more than I'm denying that phishing isn't a security issue. I even specifically mentioned the possibility of employees that fail phishing training. I'm objecting specifically to the "ransom" framing, which is a pejorative way to imply that companies have a duty to offer all security features for free.

punnerud 11mo ago

For smaller projects I actually started to like to vibe code in PHP; API, user login (magic links), webpages etc. Stable, lower maintenance, faster iterations etc. Now its really fun to build.

eterm 11mo ago

Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software. You might grumble about $30/mo for something like Postman, and it's true that "back in the day" it might have been a $40 one-off, but that's closer to $90 with inflation now, and there's a good chance that would have only bought you version 4. Then next year version 5 comes out, and you face a dilemma. Do you pay all over again? Do you end up staying on version 4 until eventually there's a compelling reason to upgrade? SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version. Software is economically expensive to produce, we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do.

paulryanrogers 11mo ago
Shrink wrapped software also often had cheaper upgrade packages, so you didn't always have to pay the full price each year. And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. As for FOSS going unpaid. SaaS doesn't necessarily lead to FOSS contributors getting paid more than they would if their software was going into shrink wrapped products.
- gruez 11mo ago
  >And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it. So... nothing from this century? I'm not even sure how software without activation/licensing would work out economically. You'd either need something like a CD/dongle check (which is a hassle/expensive), or accept that one copy is going to be endlessly passed around.
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  - skydhash 11mo ago
    Bought a lot of licenses for software on macOS. Some notable ones are Alfred and Things 3. I have a license for two of the Affinity (Designer and Photos) suite and a not so old version of Parallel. Most people don't really pass the license around. And it's not that much if you're a professional. But most subscriptions prices are egregious.

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stavros 11mo ago

There's only one reason for this: You aren't the customer, so your incentives aren't aligned with the vendor's. Your data is being sold to other companies, so you getting value out of the software is only necessary insofar as it keeps you there. That's not where the vendor makes their money. Classic enshittification. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to evade it.

photochemsyn 11mo ago

Imagine if compilers were only available via the SaaS model. Developers and the tech community in general would never accept this, and compilers were open sourced well before the internet had developed to the point where it would even be possible. Nobody would trust a system that sent their proprietary code off to a data center to be compiled to binaries for their platform on a monthly subscription model - the idea is ludicrous. Currently the only SaaS product that still makes sense are LLMs, but this is temporary - anyone with sense realizes that the ideal situation is to run an open-source LLM model locally and privately, but this still requires a significant investment in high-end hardware and IT technical people. That's the basic calculation: is it overall more efficient and less expensive to hire a skilled IT team to manage your in-house solutions, mostly open-source, including security patches, than it is to rely on external providers who charge high monthly fees and use all manner of sneaky tactics to keep you locked into their products? The latter is going to win in the long run.

kumarvvr 11mo ago

For products like Photoshop and AutoCAD, it would have been great to have the option to use it for a few months and stop. This way, I can subscribe when work is available and I can offset cost by earnings. Of course, I am speaking as a freelancer. However, what I understand is that this level of on and off of subscription is very difficult.

GaryBluto 11mo ago
I bought a copy of Photoshop 6.0 (2000) a few months ago for use on a modern computer. Works fine, has (almost) all the features of modern Photoshop, zero DRM with the exception of an easily saved serial number. One time purchase.

ryanrasti 11mo ago

The fundamental SaaS lock-in comes from bundling two things: 1. A declarative, stable interface 2. An expert support/ops team I think the path forward is to unbundle them. We're already solving #1. Nix has the best potential to become that declarative & stable layer, letting us reach the goal of treating cloud providers as the simple commodities they should be (I wrote about this approach here: https://ryanrasti.com/blog/why-nix-will-win/ https://ryanrasti.com/blog/why-nix-will-win/) The bigger, unsolved question is #2: how to build a viable business model around self-hosted, unbundled support? That's the critical next step. My hunch is the solution is also technical, but it hasn't been built yet.

lisbbb 11mo ago

My beef with SaaS is that every client I went to just wanted developers who would glue together these solutions and they would invariably have puzzling overlaps in the products they purchased, particularly around CI/CD pipelines. I would be like "why does this go to this other service then deploy? You know it can just deploy from there, right?" And they would invariably say that "so and so made us buy that other service for their department so we're all standardizing around it, end of story." So you can never consolidate anything and it all just ends up as madness glued together with some Python. And writing that "glue" is shitty work and I can't believe how much they paid for me to do it. I very much resent the subscription model--it is terrible for the consumer and it's crept into everything and it's just disgusting.

robocat 11mo ago

Too one-sided to be a useful article. Negatives need to be balanced against positives. B2B SaaS can have some really great advantages for clients. It is best if the market is somewhat competitive (say payroll) to help prevent vendors from upping prices too much. The vendor wants to keep clients, avoiding churn. So the vendor is incentivised to keep the product current, and often add features for free. In a non-SaaS model, the product remains as delivered, or requires version upgrades or maintenance contracts (usually crappy). SaaS can have cheap upfront costs especially if designed for easy onboarding, and often you can quit easily (low sunken costs). Old-school software delivery is regularly a nightmare, and over budget because the vendor is incentivised to take money from their clients. Tht buyer needs to choose their compromises. I worked for a payroll software company with a product that ran on Windows, and they regularly screwed over clients because there was no alignment of incentives.

ireflect 11mo ago

This entire blog really resonates. I don't take it all literally, but it is funny and insightful and dark and poetic and accurate in many ways. More weird stuff like this please.

unworkableideas 11mo ago
Thanks for the encouragement, I will try to continue being weird.

irishmanlondon 11mo ago

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