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Comment by chairmanwow1 | Hacker News Reader

SaaS is less about the capability and more the opportunity cost. Anyone can do anything with the appropriate amount of human capital and resource investment. It’s more can you provide the service cheaper by specializing and providing the service for cheaper than they could do themselves?

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Exactly. I'm a professional programmer. I certainly could create my ideal text editor, from a technical point of view. It would probably only take me a few days to get the essentials covered.

But then it would probably take another month or more to polish it and fix a few annoying bugs. I'd want to integrate things like themes for when I feel like a change of style. And language servers for when I want more powerful integration, obviously. Oh, and integrated Git support is all the rage right now. But best make it modular in case my next client prefers Hg.

Then there would be a fortnight when I got obsessed with fuzzy string matching for search and replace and how it might interact with multiple selections to create a highly efficient quasi-macro system. That would inevitably lead down a rabbit hole of reading a dozen papers and watching several conference talks. OK, at least I might have got a nice speaking gig at the end of this one, at least if there were any local meet-ups actually happening by then.

But by that time it's mid-2021. I still haven't actually got a better editor overall than half a dozen choices I could have used the day I started. I also haven't made any money for the last three quarters, and the bills are coming due.

Just because I can fix something for myself, that doesn't necessarily mean I should or want to.

Or providing the same service but much better, and at a slightly elevated price that's justified. Took me a long time to learn that I can charge a lot and still add value.

This is indeed a hard lesson to learn. For me I used to charge less out of insecurity that I will lose the customer. But later on I grew some backbone to ask more. It depends on customers as well. Now I simply steer clear of prospects too driven by price rather than value.

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