SAAS is rent-seeking at its worst. It’s predatory, anti-consumer and downright annoying. I hope this backfires on Epic.
Sign me up.
I smell dishonesty. SaaS is aligned solely to the business's interest. They control the code, they control whether you even access it after paying, etc. The customer gets no rights or considerations, so it's a one-sided transaction.
Just like Netflix and friends. I only do one subscription service and it's to play online with my niece and nephew. The rest of the subscription world can suck it, they want rent for Internet-bound software that spies and tells on you so they can sell data on top of your subscription.
Business cannot get software sales correct. Game makers did back in the 80s, 90s, and 00s before DLC became a thing.
One purchase, one perpetual license, no phoning home. Too hard to do for the modern commercial developer, it seems.
So, which interests of mine would a SaaS satisfy?
Not all software subscriptions are SaaS. See, e.g., here: https://www.dataversity.net/saas-and-subscription-complement...
SaaS means someone else runs the software and your access to it is mediated by their service (usually a networked service).
Some SaaS tests:
If you can keep running it when your subscription runs out, it's not SaaS. If it runs on your own hardware, it's not SaaS.
This concept creep elides the extraordinary level of alienation inherent in SaaS, which is exceptional even for proprietary software. This overly broad usage of the term can make the tradeoffs involved¹ in actual SaaS seem less severe than they are.
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1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...