0 → SaaS is dying
A physiotherapist with a profitable practice, met on the floor at a talk, had shopped for software for his clinic and refused it on one ground: he will not pay a subscription. Juan takes that single data point and generalizes it into a thesis he now believes. If a piece of software-as-a-service doesn't require real compute, doesn't do something specialized that has no open-source equivalent, and could just run locally, it is headed for death. Notion's genuinely special ingredient is the cloud, and rolling your own cloud storage is cheap now. What legitimately stays a subscription is what has a metered cost underneath: API access, token credits for language models. And even that, he suspects, is temporary, because the future may be everyone running their own model on their own hardware.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 16:38 (Jefferson cotizó software para su empresa pero no le gustan las suscripciones, no le gustan las SaaS)
- ↳ video diary @ 16:54 (si el software no requiere cómputo especializado, no tiene open source y se puede correr localmente, está echado para morir)
- ↳ video diary @ 17:19 (lo único especial de Notion es la nube, y hacerse un servicio en la nube hoy es propio y barato)
- ↳ video diary @ 17:39 (lo que sí tiene sentido como suscripción son APIs y créditos de tokens, y hasta eso puede volverse local)
At one of the talks, sitting on the floor because there were no seats left, they fell into conversation with a physiotherapist named Jefferson who runs his own practice and bills well. He had been shopping for software for the clinic, and had walked away from it for one reason: he doesn’t like subscriptions, doesn’t like SaaS ▸ 16:38. He’d rather someone build him the thing once, and then have it be his.
Juan takes that one customer’s stubbornness and pushes it into a general claim, and it’s the part worth keeping. Software-as-a-service that doesn’t require real computation, that doesn’t do something specialized enough to lack an open-source equivalent, that could simply run locally on your own machine, is headed for death ▸ 16:54. The recurring fee has to be buying something that recurs.
la suscripción tiene que pagar algo que de verdad recurre →
His example is Notion. Strip it down and the genuinely special ingredient, the one not every developer has, is the cloud: sync, storage, availability across devices ▸ 17:19. And standing up your own cloud service is now cheap, cheaper than paying a monthly fee for someone else’s. Which is not a claim that Notion is worthless; it’s a claim that the moat people assumed was there has been quietly eroding, and the erosion shows up as a physiotherapist in Bogotá saying no thanks, build me mine.
What legitimately survives as a subscription, in his accounting, is anything with a metered cost underneath: API access, token credits for language models, the things where your usage genuinely costs the provider money every time ▸ 17:39. Julia adds the other category, services where a human is doing work, or where constant updates are the product; the opposite is the thing you install once and never touch again, which nobody should be renting.
And then he pushes even his own exception over the edge: he suspects the token subscription is temporary too, because the future may well be each person running their own model on their own local compute. Which would leave, at the end of the argument, almost nothing that deserves to be rented. For two people who build software for a living and are trying to sell it, that’s an uncomfortable conclusion to reach out loud, which is exactly why it belongs in the archive…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open