upvote
Someone else taking responsibility for running the service is the value that SaaS offers and what SaaS buyers are looking for. Having it as a desktop app doesn't have what SaaS has.

Consumers hate subscriptions. Businesses love subscriptions. They love paying to make their problems become someone else's problems, so they can fokus on running their actual business.

reply
I doubt this. SaaS was created by enterprises who wanted to ship features into a pipeline they control end to end. The user gets to use it through a UI. Slowly SaaS became good enough and people stopped investing into their own custom workflow.

If building own workflow was cheap, I doubt SaaS would even take off. Businesses used to build on top of Drupal, Django, Rails, Magento and everything else like that. But those frameworks also become complex as they try to fit everyone's need.

LLMs cut that. You build what you want, perhaps on top of a lean framework. This "someone else taking responsibility" is how SaaS marketing won, but in this era, maintaining a small software should not be an issue. SaaS is complex because it has to serve needs of many. It has different requirements. A custom automation does not.

reply