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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> you can always add upgrades

as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.

And yet, the SaaS subscription cost is charged continuously whether the customer likes the upgrades or not.

So no, i don't agree with the SaaS business model. It's more extractive. The point of buying a piece of software is the same as buying capital equipment - purchase once, and have it work "forever" (and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true).

What i would pay a subscription for is live/in-person support.

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as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.

It's the same with hardware. At one company we used to operate a 3-year hardware refresh cycle and this used to make a lot of sense, 3 years was a long time in hardware, and this assumption was true for a long time. But the pace slowed as manufacturers stopped making big improvements and just started eking out marginal gains. We looked at our kit and our workloads and realised that we had plenty of capacity and instead of refreshing proactively we should stretch it out to a 5 year or longer cycle and replace failed equipment with new rather than disposing of things that still worked perfectly well after 3 years. Saved a ton of money doing this, both in buying hardware and in the effort taken to move applications around. Of course manufacturers got wise to this and looked for ways to get you back on that treadmill.

Yes, but I think that misses the original point of OP's argument, which is that the variable cost nature of SaaS is beneficial to customers that don't want to or can't think about 3 vs 5 year lifecycles.

And while you may still have a perfectly valid use case for hardware, I think the growth of IaaS speaks for itself in showing that variable pricing is popular.

Say hello to Product as a Service.

>and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true

I disagree with that to a degree. Sure the bits that make up your software don't "rot", the compute environment under which it operates is always changing and will lead to it no longer working.

Try taking any PC, whether it's Windows 10 running IE or it's Ubuntu running Firefox, and just stop updating it. How many years will you feel comfortable using it? _Eventually_ you're going to need security updates, interface with new protocols, support/function on replacement hardware when it dies, etc.

I'll acknowledge that in reality, there are internet routers, industrial machines, and the like that can probably run for decades on the same software revision given enough babysitting and like-replacement of the hardware. But even the security software around those like firewalls are going to need to be refreshed and upgraded which costs money. In the grand scheme of things, somewhere in the stack, something is constantly being upgraded and refreshed, and SaaS fits perfectly into that model.

> I'll acknowledge that in reality, there are internet routers, industrial machines, and the like that can probably run for decades on the same software revision given enough babysitting and like-replacement of the hardware.

Don't forget every medical lab machine ever made.... some of that stuff is still running windows 95

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