Comment by PaulHoule

Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!

There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.

I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.

In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.

That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.