The Great SaaS Gaslight

SaaS as Control, Anti-Piracy, and Lock-In

• SaaS is framed as a way for vendors to gain “perfect control” over users: you can pay more, but never less, and are locked into ongoing rent.
• Several comments link SaaS growth to piracy: on-prem piracy was rampant in many regions and among some enterprises; SaaS enabled monetization where licenses were previously ignored.
• Web scraping is described as the SaaS-era analogue of piracy: extracting value from others’ hosted data.
• Vendor lock-in is a major concern: data is hard to export or migrate, “mission-critical” SaaS is seen as especially risky, and some products (e.g., AWS Amplify) are cited as extreme examples.

Economics of Subscriptions vs “Own Once” Software

• Supporters argue subscriptions reflect the ongoing cost of development, hosting, and keeping all users on the latest version, avoiding old-version dilemmas.
• Critics counter that many users would be fine with “version 4 forever,” and that SaaS encourages bloat, feature-gating, and maximizing billing rather than usability.
• Postman becomes a poster child: an API client that, in critics’ view, expanded and priced itself to service VCs and enterprise extractive models.
• Some praise hybrid models (e.g., subscriptions with perpetual fallback versions) as a fairer compromise.

FOSS, Licensing, and “True Cost”

• There’s tension between open source ideals and capitalist incentives: maintainers often change licenses when they realize they need income.
• Comments highlight that permissive licenses provide no leverage against corporate “beggar barons,” advocating strong copyleft (AGPL) to force reciprocity.
• Others note that SaaS often doesn’t improve FOSS maintainer compensation and that society generally underpays for software and open source labor.

Cloud, Self-Hosting, and Glue-Code Hell

• Some argue cloud/SaaS is economically superior given ease of updates, schema changes, and immediate feedback; self-hosting with equal reliability is “not there yet” for most.
• Others claim pre-cloud setups were cheaper and simpler, and today’s reliance on many SaaSes creates fragile, overlapping systems glued together with ad hoc scripts.

User Experience, Enshittification, and Security

• Many feel software is slower and more fragile despite better hardware, blaming SaaS/“service-ification” and enshittification (features, upsells, dark patterns).
• Security features like SSO being paywalled are contested: some see “security held for ransom,” others call that framing unfair, saying robust security is possible without SSO.