Absolute rubbish. The proliferation of SaaS has been absolutely huge for business productivity, in fact, I would argue that my professional services business doesn't exist at anywhere near its profitability without it.

> I don't want my application to require an active Internet connection. I don't want it sending data to someone else's computer. Probably most importantly, I don't want the software that I pay for to change on me without my direct opt-in.

What software specifically? How to collaborate on literally anything business wise without a internet connection?! Now, is there a case for offline software? ABSOLUTELY. But to call this whole thing a fad and a trend is absurdly disingenuous.

EDIT:

Just saw your reply below:

I have multiple devices, laptops etc. in my house. Setting up a new Linux install takes me about 20 minutes. Wouldn't know about Windows. Then again, I probably use way fewer "services" / "apps" than most people. It's funny, I've always been a very tech savvy computer nerd. I've developed software for a living for 25 years. But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.

Ahhh makes more sense, you're a developer. I get that YOU might not need SaaS tools, but this is a very myopic take.

I think the question is whether you're providing an actual service that has value, or just charging rent for the software and calling it SaaS. Software has a marginal cost of ZERO, so SaaS is often simple rent-seeking. A company might actually use the money to develop a better version of the software, but that's actually optional on their part.

Big yikes. That is a really intriguing idea.

Rent-seeking to me means that the seeker has exclusive control over some asset that they did not themselves create, and uses that to extract rent from people who want access to it.

Amazon selling free software SaaS doesn't seem like rent-seeking, because Amazon don't have exclusive control over anything. They just offer better value than their competitors, for various reasons.

MongoDB selling SSPL'd SaaS doesn't seem like rent-seeking, because they invested in creating the software, and they aren't stopping anyone else from selling it as SaaS either, just requiring them to do so on a sort of level playing field.

Even Oracle selling proprietary SaaS doesn't seem like rent-seeking, because they invested in creating the software.

What am i missing?

They aren't, though.

> Furthermore, most SaaS companies don't seem to have network effects or any particularly large switching costs.

On the contrary, switching costs is a big part of what they optimize for.

> Given these dynamics, why haven't we seen a race to rock bottom SaaS prices in and around $1 like we did with games and paid apps?

Games and paid apps that aren't shovelware shit don't cost $1 either (if they do, they're screwing you over with some combination of IAP, ads, and embedded surveillance frameworks).

My take: software resists commoditization. On top of that, SaaS is the ultimate attempt to ensure your software is not a commodity.

Think of it this way: is Netflix a competitor to Disney+? To HBO Max? To YouTube Premium? Only to the extend their catalogues overlap. Which, unsurprisingly, they don't. Since movies/shows aren't good substitutes - e.g. if I want to watch Star Trek, neither Star Wars nor Friends are actual alternatives - this means I have to pay for all of them[0].

It's obvious in case of video streaming, but you can extend this argument to any SaaS. Even for SaaS in ostensibly the same market, they tend to not have full feature overlap, and always find a way to make sure costs of switching are big. No common import/export format. Getting you used to a idiosyncratic workflow, or an interface. Unique integrations. Etc.

Think about a person working in Google's office suite collaborating with a person working in Microsoft Office. It's a painful, uphill battle unless both of them learn both systems and then pick either. But they still need to know both, because they're very much not equivalent and strongly non-overlapping in features.

In similar ways, they're protected from competition. Take Spotify. The streaming music player part is trivial to replicate these days[1] - but this fact doesn't spawn millions of competitors, because music player is not the valuable part of that SaaS. The deals with record labels are, and good luck getting those. Little competition -> not much pressure to lower prices.

--

[0] - Which, in practice, means paying for one or two, and then sailing the high seas for the rest, because ain't anyone has time or patience to deal with half-assed enshittified webshit chrome around a semi-broken in-browser video player. But that's orthogonal to the topic at hand.

[1] - In fact, Spotify has been innovating hard over the last decade to make their player as annoying to use as possible - you really can't make something this anti-ergonomic on your first try.

I pay $40/year for Remember the Milk, a SaaS, and it's one of the most valuable ways that I spend my money - I easily get more than $40 a month in increased productivity (assuming a $20/hour personal time rate). Speak for yourself.

As the owner/founder/author of a bootstrapped SaaS app, I can answer that:

People really, really, REALLY do not want to pay. Really. The dominating perception is that software should be free, or if not free, paid with a one-time purchase in the single-digit dollars. The aversion to paying is huge, you have to provide a "can't live without" feature for people to (grudgingly) pull out their wallets.

Also, if you actually do the numbers as a business owner, it turns out that consumer SaaS apps are difficult to sustain financially. With a small number of customers, there just isn't enough money, and if your customer base grows, complexity and costs step in. My SaaS only has paid business tiers for now, starting at $39/month, because much as I try, I can't see how I can make anything cheaper work. It's easy to underestimate costs if you've never ran a business.

I decided to stick with it, charge subscription fees, grow very slowly and see where it takes me, but that is a hard and slow path. I estimate it will take me another year (for an overall of 3 years) to get to a sustainable income stream.

as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.

And yet, the SaaS subscription cost is charged continuously whether the customer likes the upgrades or not.

So no, i don't agree with the SaaS business model. It's more extractive. The point of buying a piece of software is the same as buying capital equipment - purchase once, and have it work "forever" (and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true).

What i would pay a subscription for is live/in-person support.

You hit the nail on the head. Affinity isn’t a SaaS service. It’s a licensed software product sold by major version.

Although the corporate world seems to have left the product/service distinction behind, most _people_ haven’t (and accountants certainly haven’t).

Nowadays businesses use this to create a constant revenue stream from what used to be a single purchase. It's not to service the product, its to continue to soak money from the people who do end up spending on it.

Aside from security updates most software I have, I just want them to stop. No changes, no design upgrades, no "we changed this tier of our pricing" etc. Most of that stuff is working against the customer not for them. Your SaaS model is so you can make money, I have no incentive to pay more than I have to.

> solved a few problems for a few people

Are you trolling?

A great deal of SaaS is essentially just building in a "bug" that one must phone home to a central server over the internet to use the software, and pay a monthly fee for the privilege.

I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.

If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.

One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.

I'm getting a bit of an extremist regarding SaaS, I'm happy to admit it. It's just that, the more it gets shoved in all sorts of businesses it doesn't really belong, the more I realize is just a form of very modern rent-seeking.

When a product-making business moves to a forced SaaS model, it's basically admitting defeat: it says the market does not value their work enough to profit from innovation alone, so from now on it will extract rent from established customers. That is depressing and exploitative.

I'm happy to have the option to turn my product-buying into a recurring event; but at the end of the day, in most cases I want to buy products, not to subscribe to a book-buying club. This because products change, in some cases for the worse. PyCharm in a few years might drop support for Python 2 (or something equivalent); why should I not be able to run an old installer I paid for whenever I need to work with Python 2 ?

I fear sooner or later somebody will file a class-action suit, and a lot of people will be sorry.

Or not improve it all - but charge you for continued access.

Should he tailor his tshirt too? It is totaly fine to whine about something without fixing the industry by yourself.

I for one don't like the movement of commercial software to forced cloud integration. Big or small business. What would have been shareware or naggware would today be SaaS and be gone the day the server shuts down.

> Saas isn't the only way to pay people.

> It kind of is if you have a product that people expect updates for, or you have to have very high prices, or a secondary source of income.

> > most software is living and breathing and requires continual investment Is it though? or is this broadly another side effect of value extraction focused engineering? I'm quite happy to buy a new version if it makes my life notably easier. CS2 is broadly a better experience than CC, etc. etc.

But are you happy to pay for better architecture that doesn't have shiny new features? Or support for new X (depending on the product this could be image formats, it could be architectures)? etc

To be clear I am not saying I want subscription based software, but I understand the business argument for it.

You really don't see the difference? I'll help you out: one is a basic (and at the moment, scarce) necessity, the other is a unnecessary luxury.

Out of curiosity, would you pay for a standalone Google Docs that worked locally and pushed data to a server (say, a daemon you can also purchase and run in your home computer or droplet) only when you wanted to sync? If you are willing to pay, Microsoft offers much of this through Sharepoint + Office.

Isn't it understood that that's what that potentially could be? I have my photos in the Google Cloud knowing that they'll stay there only as long as I can pay for the service. I trust they won't raise their prices like that, but I have no control over it, and if they do, yeah, that's something unethical going on. What is the alternative to SaaS though? SaaS is not only the software, it's also the cloud, and I have a real hard time arguing that charging someone to use the hardware is some sort of physical malware.