If you are so passionate about it then start a company that builds, deploys and maintains SaaS software on-prem for a comparable cost (say $10/user-mo). If you can provide the same service, guarantees and price points as the typical SaaS while letting companies keep control of their data and preventing lock-in then you'll have the largest market in the world.
It didn't universally work fine. Every non-technical organization I know of in my circles remembers "the server" with huge disdain, and they're very glad that Google and/or Microsoft has allowed them to get rid of it.
And when you had to update version and pay new version license you got push back from bean counters, because current runs fine - and bean counters didn’t like to hear now we have to pay 10x or 100x because no one wanted to spend money on incremental updates because it worked.
You say no need for staff then describe the need for technical staff with specific sysops capabilities.
You can pay for a lot of seats with a $70k salary and that's on the very low end.
If you account for opportunity cost you have to be very large before on-prem becomes worth while or your time must be worth so little that you're probably better doing another business.
But there are tons of small businesses that use IT MSPs. That's how it used to be done for companies that aren't large enough for a full-time IT staff member.
Take for example my friend who works in a ~15 person office in a specialty finance field. Most of their software is SaaS, but they still need someone to manage that software. Plus, the eternal struggle of setting up, managing and supporting employee machines means they need IT services, they just use a local firm. Before SaaS, they would likely have a small on-prem server, but they would be hiring the same MSP firm and probably paying roughly the same amount. SaaS software is normally way more expensive, and that cost increase isn't often offset by a greatly reduced consulting fee for many small businesses.
I have a friend that works at an MSP, they have customers who need help setting up and managing a Square POS system. While that is easier to configure that a locally hosted windows based one from 20 years ago, it's still more than many people opening a restaurant are comfortable with. And is the monthly fee cheaper that a one-time purchase and setup fee plus occasional paid upgrades? I'd genuinely be curious to see an accounting breakdown for a restaurant's software & hardware costs now vs 20 years ago. Hardware is certainly cheaper, but I'm not that convinced that it's really much cheaper overall. Square POS is 69/mo + 50/mo/device for the minimum anything beyond a popup or food truck would need [0], and $828/year minimum isn't exactly free, damn near doubled to $1428 if you have a second register. Especially if you also need to hire the same MSP, just at a potentially reduced number of hours per year.
You say before SaaS like you weren't there. As someone that was trust me there is a reason businesses jumped at the chance for SaaS. On-Prem is awful for just about everyone. Even when I was working with very large companies like PwC that had IT departments those departments spent half their time complaining about having to managing the office servers and random installs. Companies didn't just force SaaS to happen, clients moved to companies offering it then the rest of the companies followed.
SquarePOS is free. The monthly fees come from addons which you'd be paying for as multiple separate pieces of software previously. Stuff like Kitchen management/time roll/online ordering/etc. Plus your merchant account costs which if I remember right last time I got an actual merchant account about 15 years ago was $500-1000.
Also the monthly fee is per location not terminal so you've doubled up the fee incorrectly.
No need for staff for me, I can do it myself. Been doing it for many years, for small projects. On prem is worth it. A 35 euro/ month hetzner server beats any SaaS at the same price range and can host many projects.
And if I hit the jackpot and get millions of users, I prefer to pay employee salaries than vendor lock-in SaaS fees.
Start with a few services at ~10$/user/month and it doesn’t take a very large org before the numbers get quite high. And you generally still need some technical support in house.
Right but on-prem doesn't mean you escape SaaS pricing. It'll still be $10/user/mo but now you have to run it too. A lot of times you'll pay a premium on the hosted price to get an on-prem version.
Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.
That depends heavily on how competitive the sector is. Restaurant POS software covers a the largest array of different companies and businesses models I’m aware of. SaaS is generally quite expensive in that market.
In the bits in the box days, quite a lot of the world was skipping version numbers. That was a huge reason for SaaS pricing in the first place. Worse boxed software generally needed some improvement to justify upgrading, SaaS is heavily optimized for rent seeking.
If you're a large org then adding dedicated staff to manage servers probably makes financial sense but you're also large enough that you're paying support contacts that are probably not far off that Saas price anyhow.
If you're not a larger company you are paying consultants and the licensing fees.
Criticizing harmful practices doesn’t require building a replacement from scratch. Saying “just build your own SaaS company” is a deflection, not a real argument. We don’t demand people create alternative governments to criticize corruption or build new roads to complain about traffic systems. Some practices — like vendor lock-in or exploitative data handling — are worth rejecting simply because they’re harmful.
Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”
Hmmm.. not everyone is talented in keeping software up to date. A selling homemade earrings can use something like shopify or paypal or stripe easily.
Do you use visa or mastercard? That is SaaS.
The main thing govts need to do is to force companies to allow export/import transparently . But then small SaaS don't have man power to do this (even if they truly believe in cause).
and also penalize or jail both programmrs/CEO that use subscription model with cancellation fee for even cancellations. Lots of people in HN would even be against this - as they claim - I wrote the code only - following orders.
But you'll also compete with very deep VC pockets that don't mind burning lots of money to entrench themselves, so you usually can't compete on cost, until they start the squeeze.
