We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.
Microsoft 365.
Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system.
Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk.
Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro.
Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.
> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.
Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.
But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...
Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.
One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
I’m on Team Airgap but I would expect that bringing on dedicated devops staff to maintain internal systems would blow away any cost savings and leave you at higher risk for downtime if the one Linux Wizard you hired to set it all up leaves for greener pastures. At least the SaaSs have a higher bus factor.
And then you have your security risks of duplicating your access control. So you mirror all your employees emails, now you have to make sure only administrators have read access and avoid ever exposing that system to the internet and prevent exfil.
I’m thinking of how to do this for a friends company and the amount of stuff that a SaaS takes care of is staggering. Right now I’m stuck on learning to be my own root CA to distribute client certificates for mTLS so I can avoid relying on third party SSO/auth.
I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s).
You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).
With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...
With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.
With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
Email notifications from your CRM stop getting delivered to your employee’s inboxes (which means your business is losing revenue). CRM vendor says ”problem isn’t on our end”. Hopefully someone at your company understands DNS and MX records and SPF records and SMTP headers in log files so you can go back to your CRM vendor and keep barking up the chain until you get someone who understands how Mailgun works so you can explain to them how to fix their problem.
When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.
This is a mail gun issue then isn’t it? Hosted email by Microsoft was one of the early SaaS products and the entire reason the original AJAX was created by Microsoft for IE
Yes, but it also wasn’t going to get fixed without in-house tech expertise.
Or flip it around. Your marketing is using Mailgun, and they just ran an expensive marketing campaign, but none of the emails are going out.
Or the marketing person says Mailgun sucks so they just send mass marketing emails from their work email and now your domain is on a blacklist.
An employee gets phished and their email sends out spam to all your vendors. Your main supplier blocks your domain until their IT can talk to your IT to confirm your IT has fixed the issue. ”we reset their password” isn’t going to cut it.
Your cybersecurity insurance renewal requires 2FA and geoblocking login attempts. Your office manager thinks they maybe figured it out, but now no one in your organization can login.
At the very least you need someone on retainer you can call. The cheapest option, if you can find one, is finding an IT consulting company that works on a time & materials basis. That way you aren’t paying continually but you’re not dead in the water when something breaks.
Google closing your account for some random reason. Their API's being maliciously compliant. Their systems being down. Browser/client compatibility issues. Network/connectivity issues, etc.
Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.
Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.
Have you seen any reports of Google randomly closing business accounts? What do you think the reliability of Google’s servers compared to an in house managed server? Have you ever known GSuite not be available with Chrome?
As far as network/connectivity, how is that a Google problem if your office can’t connect to the internet?
Yes, Google closes business accounts too. Just search on HN, there are plenty of instances of this happening that have made it to HN. More if you go dig around on the web.
In my experience Cloud provider reliability is about the same as self-hosting. They claim to have super reliable uptime, and it's hard to see history, but they regularly have small outages in various regions, areas, etc.
In real world anecdata I've had our Google stuff stop working more often than some of my stuff, though my stuff is very stable and never changes, except relevant security updates, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. Also our stuff is running on over-sized hardware and can handle 2 node outages without issue. Since the hardware this stuff uses is on a 4hr support contract, it's very, very rare that even one node goes down for more than a day. Of course we pay a lot for that stability, on purpose.
I agree IF you use Chrome, then Google's browser compatibility issues are near zero. Not everyone uses Chrome.
It's not a Google problem, but it is still a USER problem someone has to manage and handle.
Clearly you have never done much if any end-user support.
Stuff does occasionally break. In my last place Google managed to wipe the HR drive. (Yes, I checked the audit logs to see if it was user error - nope). Of course, it should have been backed up, but HR were the only people with access so it wasn't.
It was fortunate that we were paying for the level where there was a separate way for discovery lawyers to suck out all your files, as that was the only way I found to get them back.
The other issue with gsuite is the file ownership model means that by default files are owned by an individual and can end up being lost after they leave. Transferring ownership is some kind of weird batch job that can fail and need to be retried.
If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.
Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.
OMG. It's an absolute pile of crap on fire. Not just teams - Exchange/Outlook is as bad.
Last year we had Mac users start to report "when I attach a file, it looks like it's sent, but then recipient never sees it, and sent-emails doesn't show it either!" It got worse and worse.
This is kind of a problem in a business that sends and reviews a lot of documents. I spent two months on countless calls with MS, repeatedly capturing videos they requested, etc.
Finally, I happened to come across an advisory that hey, Outlook for Mac is broken, and will "eat" attachments. Dated a week before we started to see the problem. Firstly, it took them MONTHS to get it resolved as it required significant updates to Exchange. Secondly, in all the interactions I had to have with their support team: they had NO IDEA. Worse than useless.
This list is a good summary. We have a lot of issues with logging in and two factor. Initial login and setup is particularly fraught.
And Teams. Everything.
My personal favourite is document format screw ups (‘corruption’ might be the right word) depending on which Word was used (app, browser, Teams Word). It’s such a shit product. Document footer problems and page numbering issues are a complete waste of my time.
Spending the first 10 minutes of every call trying to get sound working for everyone. Hey Teams, don’t switch what mic you are using.
Teams won’t display any usernames for an external company that added to me their chat, everyone is Unknown. Maybe misconfig, something to do with cross domain permissions, but it feels buggy and broke.
Excel has some funk around keeping shared files in sync. We set up one spreadsheet where I have read only access so I don’t accidentally delete anything. Turns out when I do make a change, excel creates a locally cached version and stops syncing changes. That took a couple hours of screwing around to figure out, and the solution was to duplicate the spreadsheet with a new name and delete the old one.
we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on.
because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
That’s not a technical problem or one unique to SaaS. Someone has to be responsible for onboarding and off boarding and making sure suppliers and vendors are paid.
A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses.
While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
Respectfully, as someone who manages Microsoft/Office 365, it’s absolutely not the same as the consumer editions. Those services run on different infrastructure and for the most part are different products/services. That isn’t just obvious from APIs and UXs; Microsoft also points it out all over documentation and processes.
Microsoft’s assumption is that businesses are using 365, and so both the number of features and the various paths to trouble tend reflect that.
To the random business owner, dropping them into anything other than Microsoft Admin Center is akin to dropping a tier one helpdesk agent into the AWS Management Console with no guidance. The trick is once you’re beyond a handful of employees you typically need to work beyond the MS Admin Center. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated with identities, deploy SSO, etc, you need to be working from the Azure or (duplicative) Entra portals. If you want to do something like route helpdesk email, you need to be in the Exchange Admin Center. Tweaking spam filters is in yet another portal (currently Security Center, although that has changed a few times). And so on. Not to mention the more esoteric features that are only available behind Graph API calls.
I used to administer Google Workspace environments too, and while that control panel is MUCH more friendly, it’s still exceedingly easy for a non-technical person following a random walkthrough online to foul up their environment. I’ve watched that happened first hand many times.
What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.
This is why it should be the c-suite making the final call, it might not seem like a lot of work but an hour of your time is in the region of $100-$150, but a full time IT person can be hired for €60/hr.
At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.
Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.
IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.
I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.
Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.
There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.
The guy might have been a bit under loaded, at least after the initial burst, but given that SaaS wasn't available at the time I don't think there was a good alternative. Getting someone in part time would have been a false economy the first time something screwed up and they weren't in.
If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.
> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers
Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.
No serious company is going to go that route instead of using GSuite or O365. It doesn’t even offer an SSO solution that you can link to all of their other SaaS products.
And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?
I run a serious company and we have found MXRoute to be a great fit.
The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.
It’s different because you also get the complete office suite from Google.
Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?
This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
I'm having fun sounding this one out for myself! I like how it audibly bounces along via -ung -en -er -ei(eye) -ung and -al. Makes me wanna say, "Now That's Fahrvergnügen!" Or rather, Sprechenvergnügen?
Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.
I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.
> You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.
Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.
You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.
You can also send out your emails via a relay, like Amazon SES, right? Host an email server (like opensmtd + Dovecot, or with Postfix+Dovecot), and forward external emails through SES.
How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.
They are compared regarding "cost to the company". A median salary in Spain is 24k€/year, plus social security, which makes it around 31k/yr per employee. Yet I've seen several companies using crappy services' free tier (definitely not targeted for businesses) because paying 140€/yr for MS365 Business Standard and 85€/yr for 1Password was too much when "we can use Google Drive [with 'personal' Google Accounts not controlled by the organisation in any way] for free, and KeePassXC synced through Drive".
Now, compare 250-300€/employee/year with how much you spend on salaries, and think how much it's hurting productivity to have these weird (and probably against TOS) arrangements, compared to just paying a few bucks for software.
Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.