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?

I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote.

We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source.

Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze.

Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache.

We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source.

While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability.

Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'?

I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.