>It’s actually worse than that. A centralised SaaS product has to architect for diversity - every customer’s feature permutations, every edge case, every conflicting workflow, all coexisting in a single multi-tenant system. That architectural complexity is enormous. A custom build for a single customer doesn’t carry any of it. One set of features, one workflow, one tenant. Orders of magnitude less complex to build, and orders of magnitude less complex to maintain and run in production.
SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour. Plus the architecture to cover scaling needs.
With some thing Claude churned, you're on your own.
> The deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.
Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.
If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 16.8 ms ] threadThe deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.
SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour. Plus the architecture to cover scaling needs.
With some thing Claude churned, you're on your own.
Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.
If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.