The Great SaaS Gaslight
95 comments
·October 25, 2025eterm
Nextgrid
Counterpoint: what if version 4 is just fine?
> Software is economically expensive to produce
Maybe we just produce too much of it in an effort to justify our salaries and stock prices?
For all the software that's been produced over the last 2 decades, I'm not aware of any significant breakthroughs to show for all that effort (LLMs might be the closest, but they are down to sheer processing power rather than software itself).
My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.
missedthecue
"My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable."
Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.
- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.
- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.
- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.
- Encryption by default is practically universal now.
- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.
- Universal file formats and APIs
noir_lord
> I restart my computer every 3 months
Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.
They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).
Nextgrid
> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable
2010 is Windows 7 era, not the dark ages of pre-XP-SP2. I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue - all the ones I've experienced are due to my own fault by trying to overclock the system.
I'm sure shitty hardware and drivers is a thing (this is traditionally where Apple excelled at in comparison) but I don't recall it being an issue on quality hardware.
> I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it
Shitty Wi-Fi/broadband/peering? Ironically nowadays I sometimes experience that too, except instead of waiting for video to download I'm waiting for some Javascript to finish re-rendering the page 3 times.
> I remember constant Skype issues around 2010
Again shitty connection maybe? I was spending every evening on Skype calls and to this day it's been way more reliable than anything I've tried since, thanks to it being P2P. So I guess if you were having constant issues it's down to the network.
neevous
> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable.
While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.
Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.
Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.
Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.
Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.
IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.
Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.
ozim
Restarting?
Huh I remember times when I was basically reinstalling the system once a month because of file system issues.
Putting computer to hibernation nowadays works and earlier it would most definitely cause problems.
croes
I remember that when I clicked a button in the UI and got an instant reaction instead a pause because some resource has to be loaded the cloud.
Swizec
> My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.
The problem is that everything after `-` is a service. Someone needs to keep those running.
By way of analogy: You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever. You pay a small portion of every purchase to keep the supermarket service running.
Nextgrid
> Someone needs to keep those running.
Those services are either paid or havd (much less obnoxious) ads - that didn't change. OSes themselves were paid, typically baked into the purchase price of the computer.
> You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever
But I don't expect Walmart to get worse at its primary purpose of taking my money. Imagine if Walmart replaced its perfectly-working checkout lanes with a new version where the PoS had a random ~10s delay in between scanning items, would have a 10% chance of reloading the page and force the cashier to rescan everything, would sometimes register the wrong items, and would distract the cashier with bullshit "suggestions" while he was trying to scan items. That would be crazy right?
ponector
>> My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.
Imagine how miserable will be the experience to use 2010 computer with modern web and modern software!
I remember once I was forced to upgrade the old PC because it couldn't play YouTube video smoothly after they updated used codecs.
pjmlp
Eventually the company won't sell enough version 5 to keep everyone employed.
ceejayoz
Maybe that means we don’t need version 5? Companies aren’t supposed to be immortal.
dns_snek
That's the expected outcome when companies stop creating value.
lisbbb
Every SaaS is someone's grift. It is what it is. Before that it was smartphone apps. The grift will move on eventually.
franga2000
Postman has over 600 employees and has raised several hundred million dollars in venture captial. The reason Postman is this expensive isn't because it's very expensive to develop and maintain, it's because you're paying off the VCs.
If they took a reasonable investment and kept a reasonably sized team, they wouldn't have to charge for a curl GUI what Adobe charges for their entire suite of industry-leading creative tools.
paulryanrogers
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
>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.
skydhash
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.
paulryanrogers
GOG sells plenty of software without DRM. DLC is much like the upgrades and expansions of old.
SaaS is fine for what it is. It's just not a trade off that suits everyone. And crucially it denies users control over the tools they're paying for.
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stavros
The problem with Postman isn't that we couldn't pay the developer a living, it's that it had to grow and grow and grow until it could extract the maximal amount of money from whatever corporate user it could get, in the process losing what made it good in the first place (simplicity).
It's not an accident that my company migrated to three clients in the space as they all met Postman's fate, and we're probably going to migrate to a fourth one soon. I'm surprised Postman is still around, but I'd be even more surprised if it's doing well.
fishmicrowaver
Yeah sure, but I was probably fine with version 4, and it is now a massive hog of an app that contains all sorts of bloatware to justify its cost that I don't need or want.
matheusmoreira
> 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
Well then let's start recognizing it right now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...
> Why I (A/L)GPL
> Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.
> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you.
> If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
> To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation.
> You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid.
> They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run.
Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved.
unworkableideas
There are definitely advantages to the SaaS model. I was an excited and early believer and I absolutely recognize the amount of work and risk that goes into development of software. I also appreciate the business model — the new version cycle was exhausting in a different way. But working as a reseller for some big SaaS vendors there is just a ton to dislike about the model and the bundling of the services. At certain point, it really stops being about the users and it becomes a game of maximizing revenue. I guess I really can’t blame them, but it adds so many levels of complexity in the name of maximizing revenue instead of empowering users with capabilities.
ForHackernews
Software is not economically expensive to produce. It's cheaper than almost any physical good. On the contrary, because software is so cheap to produce, it's extraordinarily profitable, and SaaS is even more profitable because customers keep paying over and over again for something that only needs to be produced once.
blfr
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.
BolexNOLA
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
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
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.
skydhash
> very difficult to configure not as a service.
Why would it be? I understand your point about convenience, but not the difficulty of it.
ocdtrekkie
A server in my house has "just done all of this" for like ten years. I had to run one command to fix it recently. It has the capacity to support dozens of users.
The idea some shared document editing is worth $10/seat/month is absolutely insane. We have built a temple to madness.
nizbit
Don’t forget the tiers where security is held for ransom!
gruez
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
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
>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.
fidotron
The elephant in the room: piracy.
drob518
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
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.
fidotron
> 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.
Nextgrid
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.
cnnlives69
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
[dead]
fadvibe
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.
gethly
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
One of the worst vendor lock ins that I was shocked to find was AWS Amplify. What a total piece of crap!
ryanrasti
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/)
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.
kumarvvr
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.
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stavros
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.
lisbbb
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.
smitty1e
> 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
It'll be AI focusing on the task at hand. But I guess we'll change it to "the task at prompt".
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.