Re-"developer as the customer", the mismatch between who makes the buying decisions for this kind of tech (CMO's etc.), and the devs who do much of the heavy lifting to make it work, is a real challenge.
Also, your point re the economies of scale of self-hosting vs using saas is valid. For small to mid sized orgs, using a cloud offering can be more economical.
However, we've observed that larger orgs often migrate off of saas to use open-source or build software in-house. This occurs for a number of reasons:
- They will have more engineering resources to allocate, in this case to marketing / growth.
- At their scale, the fixed costs of allocating engineers to implementing solutions are often exceeded by the variable costs of saas products, which commonly have volume based pricing.
- They often have more unique requirements that are not served by any particular saas product, and closed source saas is not extensible.
Some recent examples of this:
- Several large orgs are migrating off datadog in favor of open source observability tooling.
- Airbnb recently implemented the equivalent of Dittofeed internally (they responded in this thread).
Still, you raise legitimate concerns, and we're still figuring things out. Would love to get in touch, to better understand your perspective if you have time!
Re-"developer as the customer", the mismatch between who makes the buying decisions for this kind of tech (CMO's etc.), and the devs who do much of the heavy lifting to make it work, is a real challenge.
Also, your point re the economies of scale of self-hosting vs using saas is valid. For small to mid sized orgs, using a cloud offering can be more economical.
However, we've observed that larger orgs often migrate off of saas to use open-source or build software in-house. This occurs for a number of reasons:
- They will have more engineering resources to allocate, in this case to marketing / growth.
- At their scale, the fixed costs of allocating engineers to implementing solutions are often exceeded by the variable costs of saas products, which commonly have volume based pricing.
- They often have more unique requirements that are not served by any particular saas product, and closed source saas is not extensible.
Some recent examples of this:
- Several large orgs are migrating off datadog in favor of open source observability tooling.
- Airbnb recently implemented the equivalent of Dittofeed internally (they responded in this thread).
Still, you raise legitimate concerns, and we're still figuring things out. Would love to get in touch, to better understand your perspective if you have time!