SaaS mostly exists to extract profits perpetually.
This doesn't mean it's not sometimes worth it, but when you add all the licenses together, there tends to be considerable savings if you're willing to self-host.
In reality both sides of the debate are often wrong.
The $10 option was genuine though, it was for some SaaS tool to monitor endpoints and text if things broke (about 9 years ago when I had basically zero coding experience) - so just one seat, or me trying to hack something together with text/email notifications and a nice UI. Even now I'd probably still prefer using something like that over writing something in-house, although I'd be more happy to look at self-hosting an open source option.