It's almost like the SaaS DNA is to move very quickly (break things) and react to customers.
If your developers cannot continuously deploy to their customers and make changes behind the scenes, how will your developers compete with a Slack?
Is your only value proposition data security?
A guy in Turkey and a guy in France working in their free time built Wekan, a Sandstorm app that easily replaces Trello. Two people in their spare time vs. a whole funded company. There is no way that they'd be able to build and run a SaaS service competing with Trello -- and no way I personally would use a service run by two random guys in their spare time -- but building a Sandstorm app was no problem for them, and has been incredibly useful to me.
To me the question is: how will SaaS developers be able to compete against Sandstorm developers that can build apps so much more easily?
He needs to figure out how to create a viable business, and his first order concern is getting to P/M fit by rapidly iterating and delivering product (often making several changes a day).
If they create a viable business, they have enough leverage and margins (given SaaS has very favorable unit economics) to pay for a infra and a dude to manage it,