zlacker

>>jnord+(OP)
I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams.

I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.

>>andy_p+b8
> 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.

>>Aurorn+Je
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.