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Ask HN: Are SaaS Businesses Commoditized?

by advaitruia on 9/7/23, 11:19 PM with 11 comments

There are so many SaaS competitors in every space.

Most of them seem incrementally better than the others (or much better but not 10X better as the old adage used to be).

Are all new SaaS businesses effectively a play on "Your margin is my opportunity"?

What do you think?

  • by rozenmd on 9/8/23, 6:00 AM

    My point of view as the maker of the 200th uptime monitor (that also handles status pages and heartbeat/cron job monitoring - https://OnlineOrNot.com ):

    It's more like, "[their] mediocrity is my opportunity".

    Folks are tired of paying a premium price for UI you have to train people to use because it's not intuitive.

  • by chedoku on 9/8/23, 1:49 PM

    "Commoditize" refers to a process in which a product is essentially deemed identical to the same class of offering presented by a rival company. Commoditized products allow consumers to make purchasing decisions based solely on the price-tags of the item in question."

    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commoditize.asp

  • by philomath_mn on 9/8/23, 12:53 AM

    I feel like this is kind of like asking "Isn't most software already written"?

    There are practically infinite ways to provide value with software. Some SaaS are definitely commoditized, but in general there are endless ways to differentiate.

  • by soulchild37 on 9/9/23, 3:26 PM

    It can look incremental to the founder / dev, but can feel like 10x better for the customers.

    I would say if the customers get access to the founders / devs directly, you are 90% ahead of the competitions who outsource support (who can't actually fix stuff and used to buy time) or use AI bot (same)

  • by quickthrower2 on 9/8/23, 1:04 AM

    Margin can be an opportunity (incumbent overly expensive options are what a lot of solo startups can pick away at).

    But there is more. For example being a smaller company that gives more attention, or being a bigger one that can tick all your compliance requirements. Or being local (same country). Or just marketing to a group that doesn’t know the other options.

  • by ActorNightly on 9/11/23, 8:42 AM

    SaaS, by definition, is essentially an arbitrage on developer time. Buy developer hours which result in a product, sell that product to others at a cheaper rate then it would have cost them to hire their own developers.

  • by syndicatedjelly on 9/8/23, 12:10 AM

    SaaS spans so many different industries with various market dynamics and regulations that it’s hard to even know how to answer that question

  • by qup on 9/9/23, 6:37 AM

    There aren't even entrants in some spaces. Find some niches you don't already know about.

  • by firemelt on 9/8/23, 1:31 PM

    what is commoditized means?