Start with a few services at ~10$/user/month and it doesn’t take a very large org before the numbers get quite high. And you generally still need some technical support in house.
If you're not a larger company you are paying consultants and the licensing fees.
Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.
In the bits in the box days, quite a lot of the world was skipping version numbers. That was a huge reason for SaaS pricing in the first place. Worse boxed software generally needed some improvement to justify upgrading, SaaS is heavily optimized for rent seeking.
But I can rent a dedicated server at hetzner, use ssh and set it all up. No need for a staff.
The difference is the dedicated server setup requires domain specific knowledge.
If the project needs to scale, a SaaS will become a huge cost in the overall operation and having a dedicated server is much better.
Hiring staff is still cheaper than paying a SaaS, at large scale.
You can pay for a lot of seats with a $70k salary and that's on the very low end.
If you account for opportunity cost you have to be very large before on-prem becomes worth while or your time must be worth so little that you're probably better doing another business.
Take for example my friend who works in a ~15 person office in a specialty finance field. Most of their software is SaaS, but they still need someone to manage that software. Plus, the eternal struggle of setting up, managing and supporting employee machines means they need IT services, they just use a local firm. Before SaaS, they would likely have a small on-prem server, but they would be hiring the same MSP firm and probably paying roughly the same amount. SaaS software is normally way more expensive, and that cost increase isn't often offset by a greatly reduced consulting fee for many small businesses.
I have a friend that works at an MSP, they have customers who need help setting up and managing a Square POS system. While that is easier to configure that a locally hosted windows based one from 20 years ago, it's still more than many people opening a restaurant are comfortable with. And is the monthly fee cheaper that a one-time purchase and setup fee plus occasional paid upgrades? I'd genuinely be curious to see an accounting breakdown for a restaurant's software & hardware costs now vs 20 years ago. Hardware is certainly cheaper, but I'm not that convinced that it's really much cheaper overall. Square POS is 69/mo + 50/mo/device for the minimum anything beyond a popup or food truck would need [0], and $828/year minimum isn't exactly free, damn near doubled to $1428 if you have a second register. Especially if you also need to hire the same MSP, just at a potentially reduced number of hours per year.
[0] https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing
SquarePOS is free. The monthly fees come from addons which you'd be paying for as multiple separate pieces of software previously. Stuff like Kitchen management/time roll/online ordering/etc. Plus your merchant account costs which if I remember right last time I got an actual merchant account about 15 years ago was $500-1000.
Also the monthly fee is per location not terminal so you've doubled up the fee incorrectly.
And if I hit the jackpot and get millions of users, I prefer to pay employee salaries than vendor lock-in SaaS fees.
Until hard drive died on that server and turns out backups were broken for the last 5 years.
Until someone tried to fix some (real or perceived) problem with the server and it suddenly became full of malware.
Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”
Do you use visa or mastercard? That is SaaS.
The main thing govts need to do is to force companies to allow export/import transparently . But then small SaaS don't have man power to do this (even if they truly believe in cause).
and also penalize or jail both programmrs/CEO that use subscription model with cancellation fee for even cancellations. Lots of people in HN would even be against this - as they claim - I wrote the code only - following orders.