Ask HN: Is Traditional SaaS Dying?

I think a good proxy for the question is: Does your employer try to replicate some SaaS features in-house? And do these experiments mostly succeed?

My data points: Two internal projects to replace Hubspot and Float. Hubspot will be kept, Float will be replaced.

4 points | by vibe_that_works 10 hours ago

5 comments

  • lbhdc 1 hour ago
    The company I work for is in the process of replacing jira with an in home grown solution. They ran through a bunch of trial with pretty much every vendor under the sun looking for a replacement for jira, but none of them really sparked joy. Someone rolled their own a year or so ago, and it started gaining adoption, and people liked it enough that the whole company is switching to it.

    I don't think that means saas is dead. There is a strong preference to buy instead of building if there is something worth buying.

  • plainviewinstru 18 minutes ago
    i'm at an investment firm, we do late stage privates and publics. we've built inhouse alternatives for most of our company tracking saas that we used for outbound/sourcing. also built in house crm.
  • marinaview 55 minutes ago
    We’re already seeing bespoke saas for one.
  • burntoutgray 8 hours ago
    Data sovereignty is the critical factor. If bringing the data back in-house increases security, robustness then there might be a business case for replicating only that portion of the SaaS app that is actually being used.

    Replicating software with AI is not zero cost issue. Not only do you need to pay for tokens used, but still have in-house tech and support costs to consider. Unlikely to be a strong business case for replication on those cost/ROI basis alone.

  • zer0tonin 9 hours ago
    I'm going to let you in on an open secret of the industry: a lot of SaaS companies were already zombies, only running around because of the large amount of debt they managed to obtain during the ZIRP era.

    I am self-employed but I'm tempted to replicated buffer in-house for my social media management. I feel that they are adding a bunch of pointless features while the core of the product is less and less stable.