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Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

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Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#31

Post by eknkc »

harel wrote: post #23

1. What hate? 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 sof…

Oh the Facebook thing. We had an ads account manager who really did take us to dinner. Would call, ask if we needed anything etc. It was great.

One day she ghosted us. I mean that, she ceased all communicated overnight. And in a month or something, the whole thing collapsed on everyone in the field. That was fun.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#32

Post by scarmig »

Everything is a wrapper.

The questions with GPT-wrappers are 1) how much would it would cost you to create an equivalent or better wrapper and 2) how much would it cost OpenAI etc. to replicate the same wrapper, either explicitly or through improved model capabilities.

The answers to those questions (especially the latter) make LLM-wrappers questionable to invest in or depend on. Even if it's great, there's no particular reason to think it will offer much over the base API in 6 months.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#33

Post by fidotron »

There has been a strand of SaaS companies that at least begin life as very trivial wrappers. Web based versions of CLI tools being the classic, anything from whois to ffmpeg.

Among these there always were low effort participants, but detractors (myself included) often ignore just how resistant to friction modern consumers (including devs) are. You really can build businesses by reducing the hoops someone has to jump through because to the end user that is valuable.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#35

Post by bitbasher »

I can't quite put my finger on exactly why I dislike "gpt wrappers".

I think it's because they more or less boil down to a cash grab with little chance of a future. You provide users with a feature they presumably pay for while piggybacking off a large vendor that will, in due time, raise prices and/or make your business irrelevant with their own features.

It's no better than an NFT. You promise X, until the rug is pulled.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#36

Post by dirtybirdnj »

SaaS is just hype around MRR.

Monthly Recurring Revenue is a morally bankrupt business model that attempts to take things that do not belong in this pattern and force them on consumers.

It offloads the risk from the company onto the customer. They get money, you have to remember to cancel.

They can raise rates any time, and you are at their mercy.

They are rent seeking parasites.

SaaS can be good, but I have seen it used for evil far more than good.

The proliferation of this pattern means that less and less people build software you can buy and own. Less and less software can run on your compter.

What are you going to do when the internet goes down? Then next clownstrike event?

SaaS is a liability. The cloud is not your friend.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#37

Post by marginalia_nu »

The critique is against GPT wrappers where the entire product is just a translation layer that makes API requests to e.g. OpenAI is that this isn't much of a moat: Not only can competitors trivially do the same, your LLM API provider can pull the rug from under you by rolling your business model into the next version of their chat product. This latter scenario isn't hypothetical, but has happened several times.

If you build something more substantial that also incorporates GPT calls (e.g. copilot), that's a different thing, and not typically what people refer to when they talk about GPT wrappers.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#38

Post by coronapl »

api wrote: post #5

Most SaaS is a UI in front of a SQL database with a few services built around it. Sometimes these services are quite minimal. Sometimes it really is just a UI for a database with not much else. The fact that it earns so much shows that the thing people pay for, for the most part, is usability and convenience... as if Apple being the most valuable company in the world for a while didn't already illustrate that.

I agree, but I would actually say that this is a good thing. If a SaaS can effectively map a real-world problem or pain point and solve it in a simple way, the goal has been achieved. Sometimes, there’s no need to overengineer a product when it can leverage existing technologies in a smart way.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't all SaaS just wrappers?

#40

Post by darby_nine »

coronapl wrote: post #30

If you think about it, all software is already an abstraction of hardware by definition. The real debate might be whether AI is the core technology driving a SaaS product or just an add-on to keep up with current trends. For example, SaaS products used to classify marathon runners’ images likely rely heavily on computer vision AI models—without them, the task would be extremely tedious. On the other hand, AI summariz…

> If you think about it, all software is already an abstraction of hardware by definition.

Not really—interaction with a lot of hardware is defined by software. Just looking at a cpu you have no clue how someone would use it or what they would use it for or even what kind of capabilities it has for human interaction.

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