To expand on that, yes bunch of people believe they pay for buttons, text boxes so features and UI.

Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.

Thats easy: service providers can train on the spftware to offer the service. Its literally what theyre for. Redhat didnt make linux but charges a reasonable price to support it. Like lets open source slack or something, and enterprises could self host it, or get it served by one of the service providers that pop up. And if there are bugs that are reported, then the service provider could use AI to fix them and upstream the changes so all the users benefit from it

The difference will be that they can have rent seeking practices when the software itself cant be taken hostage. They'll charge for the service and wont leech off the user for way more money than they deserve for making and maintaining the software

Maybe for enterprise box-checking. I'm sure that can be outsourced to some separate liability-shield or narrow consulting service instead. For a lot of companies, the software bit is actually all we need. I hope the current shakeout lays bare the "SaaS" whose only reason to exist as a SaaS is gluttony. ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.

I can’t believe you’ve summed this up so succinctly.

can't agree more

spot on :)

Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.

The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.

There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.