Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level.

Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations.

For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features.

Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.

> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with

How many samples do you have?

Which industries are they from?

Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features?

> ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool

Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?