On the build vs buy dilemma that software engineering leaders often discuss, I tend to stick with Peter Drucker's philosophy:
Do what you do best and outsource the rest
Twenty years ago, big tech had to invent everything from scratch, but today, some developer tools and infrastructure exist as open source or as a service. You work on your competitive edge and "outsource" the battle-tested details to more commoditized services that can operate everyday things (e.g., sending emails) for a cheap enough price.
The enterprise trap
When you're a small company, you use your credit card to purchase the hobby plan of the SaaS du jour. All is great. Things get messy when you're bigger and end up in the "request quote, " talking with pre-sales and sales, involving purchasing/procurement departments. You get discounts, and you commit to volumes for N years. Then, you need to get out or significantly reduce the commitment one day. It's close to impossible. Pricing tiers have changed, and your new volume is half, but it gets 20x more expensive.
You also wanted to replace one of this service's — let's call it Service A — integrations with a more modern, cheaper alternative. But your team has bad news for you. Integrations are only available through Service A's marketplace, and your new integration provider isn't there. Service A's sales rep tells you that they won't be. Ever. You flip the table, but there's not much you can do.
I could go on with a list of nasty things B2B software companies do, like the SSO tax.
A different take
What if we had a new category instead of the VC-funded, win-it-all, squeeze-it-all B2B SaaS? I'm calling it Honest SaaS. No bullshit. No lock-in. Just self-serve, quality products with transparent pricing.
I tend to like Basecamp's pricing on that matter. You're small? $15/user/month. Good enough to use it as a freelancer or for a small team. You're big? $300/month. No per-user pricing. Bam. Software is ridiculously cheap to scale. Yes, in some cases, infrastructure costs scale linearly with the users and usage. I get it. I still think that's not the majority of the cases, and you could model the edge cases with transparent pay-per-usage.
What if this wasn't the exception but the expectation? Let’s stop settling for lock-in and build Honest SaaS.
— João
I’m building RotaHog, an Honest SaaS for managing team rotation schedules (on-call, support shifts, release duties, etc.). Try it if you're tired of hacking spreadsheets or Slack threads together. I’d love your feedback!
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I tend to like Basecamp's pricing on that matter. You're small? $15/user/month. Good enough to use it as a freelancer or for a small team. You're big? $300/month. No per-user pricing. Bam. Software is ridiculously cheap to scale. Yes, in some cases, infrastructure costs scale linearly with the users and usage. I get it. I still think that's not the majority of the cases, and you could model the edge cases with transparent pay-per-usage.
What if this wasn't the exception but the expectation? Let’s stop settling for lock-in and build Honest SaaS.
— João
I’m building RotaHog, an Honest SaaS for managing team rotation schedules (on-call, support shifts, release duties, etc.). Try it if you're tired of hacking spreadsheets or Slack threads together. I’d love your feedback!
If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to the newsletter and buying me a coffee.