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Ask HN: Are open-source alternatives threatening SaaS

by nagstler on 8/14/24, 3:20 AM with 6 comments

I recently built Multiwoven, an open-source alternative to reverse ETL tools like Hightouch and Census. https://github.com/Multiwoven/multiwoven

This experience, along with observing similar open-source projects in other domains, has made me wonder about the broader impact on SaaS.

I'm curious to hear the community's thoughts on whether open-source alternatives are genuinely challenging SaaS dominance, and if so, in what ways?

What trends or examples have you noticed in your field?

  • by austin-cheney on 8/14/24, 10:04 AM

    If I can find a free and open products on Docker hub then so be it. You won’t get support though.

    Open source is interesting. Most developers, the creative ones, are bored and supremely unmotivated at work so they do their best work on hobby projects that become open source. That’s actually not the interesting part.

    What about the rest of developers that aren’t creative? It turns out they are frequently addicted to free open software products at work and cannot function without, complete reliance. Both startups and large corporate employers are super reliant on this.

    > What trends or examples have you noticed in your field?

    I do enterprise proxies and API management. We use a low code solution that is both a retail software product and SAAS. In under a month I wrote a solution, that I think is far superior, to solve for optimizing my home network. It’s only superior because the build time is 5 seconds versus 8 minutes, allows for superior concurrency, executes faster, and is configured from a single tiny JSON file. It doesn’t have as many features though.

  • by shortrounddev2 on 8/14/24, 3:27 PM

    I think the economic value of SAAS is not in the first S (Software) but the second S (Service). People and businesses don't want to handle physical infrastructure or even virtualized infrastructure. They want to give people money and have all their technical issues solved for them. Self hosted or locally-run open source alternatives are popular among devs and engineers who enjoy debugging things and configuring software, but for people who are trying to run a non-tech business, it's a waste of time.

  • by debacle on 8/14/24, 5:49 PM

    Eventually, all SaaS platforms (and all software, for the most part) become open source.

  • by kgraves on 8/14/24, 3:41 AM

    The future of SaaS is free and open source.

    With this the cost of software (excluding maintenance) converges to zero.