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Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return to installable apps?

10 points by cyrusradfar ↗ HN
TLDR; is there an opportunity to compete with B2B SaaS software providers who serve small mid-market by providing a one-time licensed, "local", version of software vs a subscription SaaS offering?

When I started my computing life, software lived in boxes you bought and brought home. IT was on one to 30 disks that you'd use to run it and, every once in a while, it would ask you to pull find disk 14 and put it in to run some process.

Now, we have had about almost two decades where many products live on servers outside your system.

As I'm working on something now (I won't self promote), and it's inspiring me to try something completely different in the product and system design, to try to accomplish much more on the local file system.

I don't know if anyone's coined a term, but I've been calling it "Local-first" or "Cloudless" development. The idea is that most features can be implemented with flat files, and potentially a local sqlite, duckdb, etc.

I'm of the belief that the economy isn't in a great place and folks will look to cut. A great way to do so is to stop paying insane SaaS fees and start to use more local installed software with a one-time license purchase and you pay to upgrade as needed for features. This is the blend of the old world and new.

Software versions can be downloaded and updated from the cloud, for a fee, otherwise, you just use what you have relatively with some support guarantee, e.g. 3 years for any version, then there's no more bug fixes/support.

I'm curious if you all feel there's an opportunity to re-build a lot of the SaaS world in this model and Agents are going to make it possible by allowing normal people to handle more complex local setups for software.

I think there's opportunities for:

  - Accounting software 
  - POS
  - Scheduling 
  - CRM & client
  - Electronic Medical Records (ERM)
I want to be clear, I'm not a "purist" claiming nothing can be hosted, e.g. some dynamic lists/maps are best managed server-side and the app can reload them, just that the business doesn't charge extra for having access to the cloud.

Thoughts?

10 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] thread
paulcole
No. All I want is to give 0 thought to software. I help to run a marketing agency. Labor is our #1 cost by a huge margin. The monthly costs of software are basically a rounding error. The less we think about it the better.
raw_anon_1111
Absolutely not. No company wants to run around maintaining and updating software on multiple computers. Right now, even a small company can use an SSO provider and federate all of their SaaS apps with it and it automatically authorize a new employee.

And how do you propose to write software that works and syncs between Macs, Windows, ios and Android devices?

dismantlethesun
I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.

I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:

- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall

- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used

- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded

And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.

cyrusradfar
I think that there's a large market of business (cardinality, not revenue) that run off a single computer today. Meaning the business owner leverages some fractional accounting, ops, fulfillment support, but do the books, payroll, buy things for the business themselves.

Yes, they connect through a browser to cloud software.

I recognize when you're large enough to have operations, accounting, etc. and see the value of SSO, in those contexts.

pavelai
Well, the history of software development shows that everything is changing and don't lasts forever. Golden age of SaaSes now is going to fade (at least for current version and for some time, maybe a decade). Today junior developers can create a fully working SaaS with dozens of features without even knowing how it works. And they would spend a few weeks or evenings to develop it. We are about to see a flood of services and it will make all the business model obsolete. This is what is happening now at Github. You can see a lot of excellent projects which were written by AI, and no one wants to contribute to these projects, because they can do the same project on themselves
raw_anon_1111
Just because they can write it - which is doubtful - doesn’t mean any company of note is going to trust software written by a random junior developer with any of their proprietary information.

Creating software has always been easier for SaaS type software than understanding the business and sales.

IgnacioUtrilla
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nik736
Yes, but only because of data privacy concerns.
ferguess_k
Some companies like Quora prefer apps because they get better control and can collect more data there.