Comment by hyperpape
2 months ago
Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel.
The only named product was Retool.
2 months ago
Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel.
The only named product was Retool.
We just had a $240/year renewal for teamretro.com come due, and while TeamRetro has a lot of components, we are only using the retro and ice breaker components. So I gave Claude Code a couple of prompts and I now have a couple static HTML pages that do the ice breaker (using local storage) and the retro (using a Google sheet as the storage backend, largely because it mimics our pre-teamretro process).
It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro
> It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro
Okay, so two hours with an LLM vs maybe 2.5 days without an LLM in the best-case scenario (i.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost) - it sounds like it was always pretty cheap to replace the SaaS, but the business didn't do it.
TBH, the arguments were never "It would take too long to do ourselves", it was always "but then we'd have to maintain it ourselves".
The place I am consulting at now just moved (i.e. a month ago) from their in-house built ticketing system ($0/m as it had not needed maintenance for over a year) to Jira (~$2k/m).
In this specific case, it was literally 0 hours to avoid paying the SaaS, and they still moved, because they wanted some modern features (billing for time on support calls, etc) and figured that rather than update their in-house system to add support hours costing (a day, at most) they may as well move to a system that already had it.
(Joke's on them though - the Jira solution for support hours costing is not near the level of granularity they need, even with multiple paid plugins).
Once again, companies aren't using SaaS because it's cheaper or quicker; they could already quickly replace their SaaS with in-house.
>.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost
I'm not a frontend guy, I'm an operations guy that sometimes does some backends. So it's likely a solid 2.5 days for me to build the pair of these, probably more I haven't touched Javascript in over a decade.
2 replies →
How is teamretro a product to begin with? I feel like these SaaS’s exploded like js libraries.
It is fine. We already had a retro process we were using, and teamretro didn't really enable us to change or improve our process so much as just continue doing our existing process. It is a solid product, but honestly we just used a google sheet prior to it and that worked fine as well.
Or just don’t do retro and save even more time and money!
If you're a typical software engineer, that time probably cost your company more than $240.
I didn't look at the product. But $240/year is nothing for an org. Plus not only just the time to make it. What about the time fixing bugs? hosting costs? backups? I'm sure there will be products that can be replaced (possibly this one), but I'm not convinced the death of SaaS is here yet.
Good point! For me the only change that happened so far (because the agentic product was better) was switching from JetBrains to Cursor. I'm sure this will happen with more products I use in the future