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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 2 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nine_k ◴[08 Dec 25 20:15 UTC] No.46197061[source]▶
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.

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thot_experiment ◴[08 Dec 25 20:24 UTC] No.46197162[source]▶
To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.
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sofixa ◴[09 Dec 25 09:57 UTC] No.46203193[source]▶
With a SaaS, you have one platform that you fully control. Broken dependency? Need to update/rollback? It's all in your hands.

Local software has to target multiple OSes, multiple versions of those OSes, and then a million different combinations of environments that you as a developer have no control over. Windows update whatever broke your app, but the next one fixed it? Good luck getting your user base to update instead of being pissed at you

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1. theshrike79 ◴[09 Dec 25 12:18 UTC] No.46204123[source]▶
A single Go binary can cross-compile to multiple OS-versions with a simple Github Action.

And if it's a free open source application, why would I care if someone can't run it on their specific brand of OS? I'm open to PRs.

If the "user base" wants to update, they can come to the github page and download the latest binary. I'm not building an autoupdater for a free application.

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2. sofixa ◴[09 Dec 25 12:52 UTC] No.46204415[source]▶
But you're talking about a free open source application without guarantees, that's not comparable to a SaaS vs self-hosted "paid" software in model.

And even for the cases where you it is, even with a modern language like Go that makes it easy, you still have tons of OS specific complexity. Service definitions, filesystem operations, signal handling, autoupdates if you want them, etc etc.