zlacker

This may be true pre-LLMs, but I think you need to account for the baseline build-vs-buy tradeoff shifting.

Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams.

If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt.

But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build something custom to keep avoiding responsibility, this would have the same impact on SaaS.

So I’m pretty skeptical of this first-principles prediction expressing right level of uncertainty.

>>thepti+(OP)
The same cost savings could be captured by SaaS. Potentially not by incumbents, but by up and comers.

If you can spend $10K/year to keep your in house one alive but $5K/year on the new SaaS option, you stop building your own again.

>>thepti+(OP)
You’re forgetting the companies that already had developers.

Whose job had been maintaining a single internal system but had never had the bandwidth to expand their focus.

Companies like that are the ones spending millions a year for large one size fits all SaaS products.