alt Hacker News> Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two?
About a decade ago we worked with a partner company who was building their own in-house software for everything. They used it as one of their selling points and as a differentiator over competitors.
They could move fast and add little features quickly. It seemed cool at first.
The problems showed up later. Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways. New projects always worked well on the happy path, but then they’d change one thing and it would trigger a cascade of little unintended consequences that broke something else. No problem, they’d just have their in-house team work on it and push out a new deploy. That also seemed cool at first, until they accumulated a backlog of hard to diagnose issues. Then we were spending a lot of time trying to write up bug reports to describe the problem in enough detail for them to replicate, along with constant battles over tickets being closed with “works in the dev environment” or “cannot reproduce”.
> You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM
What’s the fully loaded (including taxes and benefits) cost of hiring enough extra developers and ops people to run and maintain the in house software, complete with someone to manage the project and enough people to handle ops coverage with room for rotations and allowing holidays off? It turns out the cost of running in-house software at scale is always a lot higher than 300K, unless the company can tolerate low ops coverage and gaps when people go on vacation.
Replies
> Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways.
Maybe write some tests and have great software development practices and most importantly people who care about getting the details right. Honestly there’s no reason for software to be like this is there? I don’t know how much off the shelf ERP software you have used but I wouldn’t exactly describe that as flawless and bug free either!
In my experience, SaaS is also fragile. It's real software, with real bugs. Most complex solutions offer an extensible API/scripting support with tons of switchable/pluggable modules to integrate with your company's infra. This complexity most often means that your particulary combination of features is almost wholly unique, and chances are your SaaS has much less open mindshare/open source support than any free solution.
We often ended up discarding large chunks of these poorly tested features, instead of trying to get them to work, and wrote our own. This got to a point where only the core platform was used, and replacing that seemed to be totally feasible.
SaaS often doesn't solve issues but replaces them - you substitute general engineering knowledge and open-source knowhow with proprietary one, and end up with experts in configuring commercial software - a skill that has very little value on the market where said software is not used, and chains you to a given vendor.