Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

2. Saying all SaaS are wrappers is a wrong assumption. A service company provides a service of sorts via the medium of software. Take a CRM, it's a system to aggregate contacts, leads, deals etc. and their interaction in some sales pipeline. There might be 3rd party services integrated but the service itself is not a wrapper. You could be cheeky and say you are wrapping a SQL database but then every software written is a wrapper. So?

3. This is the real kicker: It's a question of dependency. If your entire business is completely dependent on another company, you've already failed. In the early days of Facebook's ads api, I had an ad-tech startup that managed ads in bulk on Facebook and later Instagram etc. Facebook was our "partner". Our "friend". They took us to dinner and sent us flowers. We had money, success, the lot. Until one day, our partner becomes our number 1 competitor. And thus an entire industry imploded.

As for 'GPT wrappers', I haven't seen many mentions of this. It might be more common in non-technical circles where people downplay the role of 'AI' in the marketing. I don't see it as a negative if the product does something else in addition to AI. I have noticed many products only doing AI and then you could use the AI wrapper term negatively because they're so easy to recreate using existing free AI products.

Hahahahahah*gasp*ahahahah! Oh, I almost wish that were true!

My current workplace? There's stuff like a custom flowchart-language, with pseudo-programs that differ for each customer and have to match their implicit remote business rules. It talks to dozens of different APIs of other products of which a given customer might use a few, and each have their own unique insanities, like breaking HTTP specs, or falling over with just a little traffic so that we need our own caching layers.

Then there are some revenue-generating features that are basically custom-glue logic for synchronization and hand-offs between those client-systems, because not all clients are able/willing to develop a nice one-stop centralized management system of their own as a precondition of doing business with us and using our primary features.

> Not sure why these "GPT Wrapper" companies are getting so much hate.

Because they are that kind of lame shovelware and thin wrappers designed to extract money from the confused.