Show HN: Non SaaS – Directory of Non SaaS Apps
nonsaas.com
nonsaas.com
8090ish is a fake site.
Why did you make this fake site?
I like the concept. I don't have any strong mutual connections to Chamath, I made this on the off chance that I can get his attention to learn more about his plan. If you're reading this Chamath, let's chat! I'll happily hand this site over, and I'm happy to work with your team to build the real one.Another thing I don’t like about SaaS is that most of it is a yarn ball held together by snot and twist ties that can run on only one cloud… or only one cloud account with hard coded details about that account. As such it’s encouraged a generation of developers to write this slop.
Yeah, because it's so easy to create a deployable package for a variety of distros. Especially if you have any system-level dependencies. Even more so for shitty unreliable ecosystems such as Perl, Python and Node.js.
There is a reason why Docker and friends took over deployment artifacts. Having a single reproducible (if properly done) immutable all-dependencies included artifact that will run everywhere with a container runtime is just magic. Gone are the days of "You need libcgit v2 to use my package... oh Ubuntu calls this libcgit2, but wait, I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 which only has libcgit51".
What would you suggest instead as a better alternative for this type of project
9 of the sites listed are using the same thing and link to each other in the footer as "Mars Verse".
But the customer should not have to pay for your SaaS because you don't want to work 9 to 5.
When I started programming I costed projects like this. Now I price things based on their value to the customer.
There were a number of reasons for the switch;
Firstly in the earlier model all I'm selling is my time. All time I don't have work is lost, and I can't make it back. This resulted in years of being underpaid because a month of no work was lost forever.
There are lots of things you need to do running a business test are not "billable". Finding new eork is one of them. So costing just the time you spent on the app is naive.
Pricing based on effort also allows no opportunity to grow. If I hire an employee I now need to find work for her as well. And so on.
Lastly, when making products (to sell over and over) you can't base price on cost because we don't know up-front how many copies we'll sell.
So we look at the value to the customer. Things that offer them higher value cost more. Sometimes there's a surplus, and that allows new, less certain, products to be developed. Sometimes it takes years for a product to return the investment.
We moved some (not all) products to a subscription when it became obvious that it was not possible to support all existing clients from only new-sales revenue. We needed to hire full-time supporters and since they add value to existing customers they need to be paid for by customers.
This means that if sales dried up tomorrow , existing customers could still get support ad infinitum. This is -much- more valuable to them than some small subscription amount.
So here's my suggestion. If a service is costing you more than the value you are getting, just stop using it. By definition you will be ahead. You don't need yo feel aggrieved at how other people price their stuff. That's on rhem, not you.
What would the world look like if everyone was using this mindset? Water is VERY valuable to customers for example. So is food. Tech people have a very distorted ways to look at the value of their work and I say this as someone who works in tech.
edit, to comment the original statement: Price must be >= cost of production, obviously. But it must also be acceptable to the customer. So you go as high as you can and if that is still not enough to cover your costs, then you stop your business and do something else. If it is very much higher than you need, sooner or later a competitor will notice the extraordinary profits in your sector and do what you do at a lower price.
Because in tech that might be doable but again, the "value to customer" of something like food is obviously infinitely high because without it you ain't gonna go much far.
And there's a reason why generally speaking countries have laws to prevent price gouging around a certain types of goods. Becuase without them, I am 100% sure that some dickheads would try to screw people over because that is what capitalism is producing.
But also, this idea that you should be paid based on the value I get out of your work is bizarre to me. if you are self employed or you run a business, you decide how much you want to charge for a product or a service.
Why does it matter how much I get out of it?
Because the more you get out of it, the more you are willing to pay for it.
Conversely, if it's worth more to you than you are paying for it, why do you care how much the markup is? If it's not worth it to you, don't buy it.
In "normal" contexts, sure. Would you be happy if doctors were using this aproach and just asked you insane amount of money simply because you obviously want and need their service?
The thing I'm trying to say is that this approach doesn't apply equally across the work landscape.
Hypotetical: let's say you're a developer and you code me an ecommerce site. It takes you a month to do it and you charge me 10k. Should you be paid more if I make 1M using that site? What if I make 100M?
Does the value of your work changes based on how much value I get out of it?
On the other hand there are _lots_ of examples of value based pricing outside the tech world. some examples;
a) Any "luxury good". Think Ferrari, Birkenbag, designer clothes etc. b) Any supply-constrained service - think rounds of golf at St Andrews. c) Popcorn at the movies d) Movie tickets (they are not dependent on the cost, or earnings, of a movie) e) Office rent. It costs the same to build a building, so why do rents vary so much depending on location?
and so on. value-based-pricing is not a tech thing - it exists everywhere.
Because the notion of "value to customer" means nothing. What is the value of a piece of software? What is the value of a website? What is the value of branding? The problem I have with all your examples is that those are all tangible things while software work is, for the most part, a service. Coding a website for a client doesn't cost me anything in a traditional, material sense.
I can't quantify how much it cost to make a site. But I do have to assign a monetary value to my work as a developer. And figuring out that value based on how much value my client gets out of my work is a conceptually flawed aproach IMO.
That's why software businesses with a one payment pricing structure often end up going bust - they rely on a structure where they need constant growth in their customer base to sustain support of existing customers. The software coompany going bust isn't in the interests of customers who want support either so this model just doesn't really work for anyone.
If a one-off payment is matched by a customer expectation of a one-off software install with little or no ongoing support then that's probably fine.
Granted, most of them are self-hosted (not all!), but this list needs to be called norecurringfee.com ….
Already I can see several SaaS subscriptions that can be replaced here.
It's worth understanding though that the seller owes you nothing after this. Not support. Not development. Not keeping up with API or whatever changes. Not bug fixes (although most everyone ships some free updates for a while.) Obviously not hosting.
And for lots of software this model is perfect. For other stuff it's imperfect (as anyone who desperately needs Google Support will sympathize with.)
You get to choose what software I'd on your business-critical path, and what is on your "can replace anytime" path.
Laravel does this quite well
Like adopting twenty for CRM, at just $9/user/month, so 2x the cost of Microsoft Teams, or about the same as M365!
I'm not sure about the inclusion criteria.
This website has a very different definition of SaaS than I do, and it sounds like it rhymes with "subscription".
A few more examples to make sure it wasn't a one-off:
* Foxly, a URL shortener with a subscription or lifetime deal [1].
* CountVisits, web analytics. This one doesn't offer a subscription, but it's still all hosted on their servers and therefore has usage limits (which you can pay to upgrade) [2]
[0] https://www.pabbly.com/connect/