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Comment by monomial | Hacker News Reader

I find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment?

It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.

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Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.

Exchange online with 100GB mailbox. Onedrive with 1TB storage Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user Full desktop office applications Full browser office applications Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey Teams Planner Bookings, so Calendly... Anti-virus MDM MAM Windows 10/11 Enterprise AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.

There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...

> adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO

They now have a $10/mo plan where you pick any one application.

> For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / product

How many of those do you use?

Everything except loop, kaizala, and parts of viva... so 90%?

MS has a good deal on offer if you're an IT department looking to pay less for a suite of SaaS tools that would be more expensive as one-offs. But very little of this is appealing as an actual user. It's basically Office and an inconvenient to use 2TB of storage.

When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.

I pay $89 for 15 months of Outlook for Families thing, which gives me onedrive, office and ad free outlook, credit monitoring and centrally managed anti-virus for a family of 6... You are not beating that in any other provider. Credit and dark web monitoring alone per person will cost that much per month.

It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.

I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.

Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.

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