Code Is Debt

I've been at companies where the company itself has no code assets but depends on a bunch of 3rd party enterprise services to run the core business. Brings up the question of how to measure how much code you have: if you depend on a legacy saas provider, do their lines of code count as your liability?

I think the top liability If you depend on a bunch of 3rd parties is if they close or are acquired and change the terms. Many times, we are using services from startups that were only well-funded and have not reached break-even and/or a sustainability business.

A lot depends on the details of what the service provides, but yea, the worst is when your critical data is not accessible or recoverable because someone else holds it for you and something happens that cuts you off. The doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use any service, but you do need to think through some worst case scenarios and think about your recovery strategy.

Absolutely, came here to say this.

At a previous place we used a dreadful email marketing SaaS tool and it caused us no end of fire-fighting, even though we probably only had 500 lines of integration code. We ended up rewriting the functionality we needed and bringing it in-house and saved a ton of pain and money, and added ~3k lines.