It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level.

Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations.

For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features.

Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.

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nugger 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't understand the timelines here at all.

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figers 13 hours ago | parent [-]

We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments

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raw_anon_1111 13 hours ago | parent [-]

And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?

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torginus 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

We did the same. We replaced a proprietary build system with our own. The SaaS product we used was super expensive, had a very gougy licensing scheme, had a bunch of features that either didn't work for us, or were so overcomplicated, that we ended up not using them. Before the rewrite, we bypassed like 90% of the internal features, and relied on custom scripts to do everything.

Every SaaS feature in my experience ends up being a mess due to having to support a billion use cases, and figuring it out is more trouble than its worth, might not be able to do what you want, might be buggy.

But even if you do all that stuff, you end up with a mess that can be replaced with 5 lines of shell script. And many more people know shell scripting than figuring out the arcane BS that goes on inside that tool.

It's the eternal lowcode story.

> 'doesn’t make the beer taste better'

I'd say it did. Having a CI/CD pipeline where you don't have to wait for other people's builds, the build logic is identical to what's running on dev PCs, and everything is all-around faster, and more understandable (you can read the whole source) makes testing easier, and surprises less frequent.

All in all, making a hour-long CI/CD turnaround time into 5 minutes or less has been an incredible productivity boost.

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figers 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We already had Developers and the system in place this was a tiny feature in the scheme of things.

Internally it gives us a competitive advantage of the data being in our system from the beginning of the pipeline through the rest of the system where the data would be needed anyway.

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crabmusket 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?

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raw_anon_1111 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.

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9rx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity.

The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero.

Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce.

Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.

	▲	pdimitar 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome. It will not be. Even in this fairly broken state of affairs we are currently in, most non-technical people I spoke to already say that they have too much apps and too much machines with "intelligent" features. And IMO when we have machines that can crank out a complete-but-better Salesforce, our civilization and race would be in an entirely another level and we would see such things as toys. Who needs that antiquated procurement and tracking expenses software, where's our 174th fusion reactor? What is even that in fact? Oh you mean that nail-sized addon we put on our main processing unit? Yeah we're not interested in ancient software history now. We need more juice to capture those gases around Jupiter for the wireless beaming of energy project! Our DAG-based workflow solver and the 5 AIs around it all said we can't do without it. ...So of course nobody wants to pay programmers. We've been viewed as expensive and unnecessary since the dawn of time. A necessary evil, more or less. But your last paragraph captures why many companies need them -- bespoke solutions. You can only add so many cloud services before your normal staff starts making mistakes on an hourly basis because they have to reconcile data between multiple systems whose vendors will always refuse to make integrations. And even if many try to have their cake and eat it too -- i.e. have an IT friend they call only for those bespoke enhancements but only pay them during that time and not every month -- then this service will simply become more boutique and expensive, mostly compensating for the lack of salary. You'd do multiple stints for the year that would cover all your expenses and normal lifestyle, it would just not be through a monthly paycheck. Why? Because I think a lot of people will exit programming. So the law of supply and demand will ultimately triumph. ...Or we get a true general AI and it makes all of this redundant in 5 years.

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renewiltord 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know of at least two multi-billion corps that are moving to internal ETL tools instead of 5tran now because the cost to maintain internally is much lower and you can customize for cheap. SaaS as a model is at risk without something tying someone down.

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Spooky23 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it.

For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on powerapps and have zero new opex.

	▲	pdimitar 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts. If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it. They don't get this psychological aspect at all.

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lossolo 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with

How many samples do you have?

Which industries are they from?

Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features?

> ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool

Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?

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dismantlethesun 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote.

We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source.

Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze.

Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache.

We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source.

While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability.

Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'?

I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.

	▲	Spooky23 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I ran a shared services org in a Fortune 50. Enterprise costs don’t scale down well, and things that are absolutely essential to supporting 100k people sound insane for 100 people. Our senior leaders would sometimes demand we try and the CFO and I would just eyeroll. Nobody would hire the JP Morgan IT team to run a dentist practice IT workload. Likewise, AWS can save you money at scale, but if your business can run on 3 2U servers, it should.
	▲	14 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	cyberax 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can use NFS on AWS, they have a hosted version (EFS) that is actually pretty neat.

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wongarsu 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of companies make good money selling the equivalent of leftpad for confluence or jira. Anecdotally, that's exactly the kind of stuff that gets replaced with homegrown AI-built solutions at our company

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neom 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a consultant so I see lots of businesses, it's happening in all of them. I'm not seeing people rip out tools for custom builds to be clear, I just see people solving today problems with custom apps.

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hobs 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again).

Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities.

Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.