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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#291

Post by bee_rider »

cj wrote: post #263
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

What I struggle with is developers wanting to leave platforms like Datadog for open source equivalents that need to be self-hosted. I hear all of the cost savings benefit, but I never see the team factoring in their own time (and others time) needed to set up and maintain these systems reliably long term. Something IC’s at company often struggle to understand is the reason why companies often prefer to buy managed so…

Do they actually not understand that? They might just be fine with a system that makes them more useful.

How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full salary, right?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#292

Post by caminante »

miklosz wrote: post #231
gwbas1c wrote: post #227

Reminds me of the story of when the Surgeon General (in the US) reported that smoking causes cancer. People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later. I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just lik…

And where are they now (cigarette companies)?

Well, that was 1964.

Smoking survived.

At least 2 have 100B market caps.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#293

Post by phil21 »

cj wrote: post #288
brianwawok wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.

When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…

If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem.

If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.

Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.

The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me. I could come up with the same sort of scenarios for cloud based SaaS infrastructure just as easily.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#295

Post by NewsaHackO »

ozim wrote: post #262
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

I like to bring up JIRA example. You could replace it in-house yeah it is just tickets with statuses. /s But then keep in mind one who built the replacement will become the owner of an application that business doesn’t want to pay for and that person will be cost center for the company. That person better get marketing and negotiating skills that Atlassian has on board because that person will be responsible for the…

You guys keep using services like Jira, Salesforce, Stripe, Datadog, etc. While those are definitely the biggest names, I don't think people are referring to those SaaS platforms as the ones they will replace or try to build an inhouse version of. It will be things like ETL pipeline services, data scraping services, maybe some internal analytics SaaS. The niche things that cost a lot because they’re in a sweet spot where only a few people need them, but no one used to have the resources to build them in-house. So, when the salesperson called and offered a perfect solution to their problem, they bought the service. Those are the ones that will be more targeted for in-house solutions.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#296

Post by iamleppert »

cj wrote: post #288
brianwawok wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.

When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…

Have you ever tried to contact their support?

The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.

Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#297

Post by iLoveOncall »

bee_rider wrote: post #291
cj wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I struggle with is developers wanting to leave platforms like Datadog for open source equivalents that need to be self-hosted. I hear all of the cost savings benefit, but I never see the team factoring in their own time (and others time) needed to set up and maintain these systems reliably long term. Something IC’s at company often struggle to understand is the reason why companies often prefer to buy managed so…

Do they actually not understand that? They might just be fine with a system that makes them more useful. How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full…

> Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime

What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people.

If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#298

Post by wernerb »

cj wrote: post #263
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

What I struggle with is developers wanting to leave platforms like Datadog for open source equivalents that need to be self-hosted. I hear all of the cost savings benefit, but I never see the team factoring in their own time (and others time) needed to set up and maintain these systems reliably long term. Something IC’s at company often struggle to understand is the reason why companies often prefer to buy managed so…

If there's ever any use case to leave an expensive SaaS for self hosted, you can find it at datadog

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#299

Post by eagsalazar2 »

cj wrote: post #288
brianwawok wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.

When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…

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