SaaS Is Dead

epsteingpt

Good format and hook.

apimade

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of self-hosting but there’s a reason we don’t manage and run our own email infrastructure. I think the SaaS is dead meme is really just a “SaaS can’t be lazy anymore”. The days of offering a product that technically does something, but is incredibly poorly designed, or not well integrated, or unsupported — are over. If your SaaS doesn’t support both Google and Microsoft; macOS and Windows; iOS and Android; automated provisioning, complex/fine-grained RBAC, customisable onboarding.. You’re dead in the water. The moat of features has evaporated, and your only defence is good UX, stability and TCO. AI isn’t eating SaaS. It’s eating shitty businesses. Password Manager SaaS that have been breached are dead. Auth providers that scale their pricing model to their investors growth expectations are dead. Platforms and technical products that did something a script could do, with little support for real business software, ecosystems and environments are dead.

bob1029

SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before. My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations. I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.

coldfloor

A lot of this is a massive stretch. It's majority self-hosted which the average person is not going to deal with. Some of the "alternatives" aren't even close. All but one of the Spotify/Apple Music replacements are self-hosted things where the user needs to provide the audio files. That's nothing like the near-infinite jukebox experience that Spotify and such offer. The only one that isn't self-hosted/BYOM is basically just an app-only (no web) front end for free YT music or you need to pay for the underlying streaming services anyway.

returnInfinity

I won't be hosting my own notes solution. I thought about hosting my own photos. The time is just not there, cheaper to pay Google. Until AGI or Super Intelligence saas is not dead. Once AGI and Super Intelligence here, everything is dead.

freefaler

Behold... the new lawnmower is out, all the companies that cut your grass are dead. I can paint my house and I can change the oil in my car, but I prefer not to do it. I might host something personally, but self-hosting comes with cost, uptime requirements and bug fixing (by the AI and how would I verify the fix and possible regressions?). A lot of B2B services exist to provide complete solutions. The business pays so it won't spend time/management resource/risk to nurse that solution. With AI the cost of software will go down, no more 15$ per seat plans, but it won't go to 0 or self-host everything.

znpy

looks like a fancier awesome-selfhosted ( https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted ) page

ikidd

.si? So there's people actually jumping on that bandwagon? That's hilarious.

incompletude

It is kinda funny when you realize that most replacements have their own pricing/plan pages.