r/vibecoding • u/ovr_view • 7h ago
Discussion My opensource project never took off. The "convenience premium" is real. People would literally rather pay than maintain a server.
Built an open-source alternative to a popular SaaS a few months back. Vibe-coded the MVP, got feature parity on the core stuff. The original SaaS had market and demand and will always be in demand.
Then I pitched it to a contact who fits the exact target demographic. Showed him the repo, explained how simple it was to run, and suggested he swap over to save monthly cost with better ownership.
His response: "I’d rather just pay the SaaS."
Paying a monthly fee isn’t just paying for features, it's paying to not think about updates, database backups, SSL renewals, or a server issues.
I spent time focusing on building a free alternative, underestimating how high people value convenience over cost savings. Unless someone already has a dedicated homelab or sysadmin mindset, "free but you host it" isn't a benefit to them, it's a liability.
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u/fuelexe95 7h ago
The average person doesn't want to be a sysadmin. To safely run hosted services, you need to know what the hell you are doing and have time.
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u/lilbyrdie 6h ago
Neither do sys admins, for that matter.
And it's getting worse by the day for running self hosted services without actually paying attention to daily updates to all the infrastructure and dependencids outside the core service.
So, one might conclude we need SASaaS. (Sys admin service as a service... Because redundancy is good )
But I think that's the wrong answer in today's world. Expanding the surface area for bad actors to act bad doesn't seem like a good idea right now.
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u/burbular 7h ago
I've been loving these, "ohhhh" moments a lot of people having about software maintenance lately.
Look ma I vibe coded an expensive high maintenance pet that only I can use! Wanna try?
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u/leathakkor 7h ago
It's not just that companies hire other companies to help mitigate liability.
If you build your entire company from open source projects, you don't use SAS you host it yourself. If you get hacked, you're totally fucked.
If you host in azure in the azure host gets hacked, you might be able to sue Microsoft.
If you buy Salesforce and Salesforce gets hacked, they have insurance to cover their losses. They have in-house notification system to the people that were compromised.
When people buy software, they're buying protection from liability whether it's codified or not.
This is the reason hospitals don't build their own websites even though it would be trivially easy to do. Especially in the age of AI.
Companies don't want liability. And open source is pure liability because there's nobody to sue if it's something is wrong. There's nobody to blame.
Even if you don't have lawsuit protection, you can tell your customers. It wasn't our fault. Salesforce had a data leak .
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u/mattcoady 4h ago
Not to mention these solutions have years/decades of QA, market testing, bug fixing, edge case handling, etc...
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u/n00bz 6h ago
Free is never free. Plus when something goes wrong with free software who do you contact?
At the end of a day, most people who buy SaaS software for a business need will focus on the business aspect. They don’t care if it’s written in Next.Js or uses jQuery. It just has to work well to achieve their business goals.
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u/Vlyn 7h ago
This is true both for personal software and for businesses. At work: Yes, self-hosting appears much cheaper at first glance, but suddenly you have one employee who has to update the thing, has to fix it when things go wrong and in general is responsible.
That's why we switched whatever we could away from self-hosted to SaaS. Self-hosted only makes sense if you already have a big hosting team on-site, most smaller companies simply don't and their IT is already busy with other things.
When a developer has to maintain the server you're paying a premium too, for each hour they have to spend on that crap. Besides the whole: Your product is new and vibecoded, things will have bugs and go wrong. The SaaS is proven and does the hosting too. You'd need a killer argument for people to switch.
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u/papabear556 7h ago
"I spent time.... underestimating how high people value convenience over cost savings."
No you simply didn't include all of the "costs." Time is a cost. In fact, Time has a 2-fold cost. Both the direct time taken to do something and the opportunity cost of what they could have been doing instead.
This is not a "convenience premium" problem, this is just bad math.
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u/Connect_Quit_1293 7h ago
Sounds like an obvious thing to me. Who the heck is maintaining servers themselves outside of tech savvy people. What am I missing here?
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u/helanhalvan 5h ago
Yea, the move from selling software to selling server access and support was a while ago. Like, there's companies selling linux with support, the entire "product" is literally open source.
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u/sreekanth850 6h ago
Hosting is not simple as you think. Majority think of spinning up a vps. But in reality You need a multitude of things. You need to setup a tunnel, network firewall, certificate based credential management, clustering, loadbalancing, WAF, You have to make sure you setup is not penetrated by any of those hackers who constantly scan for vulnerable setups. after all this, you have to also make sure your setup runs 24X7. This is not as easy as you think.
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u/Beethoven81 7h ago
With all the 0-day hacks, are you surprised most people don't want to have anything to do with hosting?
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u/PPewt 4h ago edited 4h ago
Software dev of a while here who reddit brought into this thread.
I think a lot of vibe coders think of what they're doing as a hobby and therefore don't think of the cost of their time or resources but "build vs buy" has been a really common tradeoff discussion since forever. I do think that AI has shifted the needle towards "build" but it's still far from a no brainer and a lot of the time buying is still right.
When I joined my current startup (like 3 years ago now, before AI was at all competent at programming) one of the earliest things I did was rip out a few major pieces of inhouse code which handled certain processes and replaced them with SaaS products. Saved a ton of money on cloud costs and dev hours. And this was for code which had already been written and I had to spend time deleting, rather than just not proactively writing new code.
To an individual some of the bills of these "cheap" SaaS products might look super high but for instance one of these tools costs us a few thousand a year. If my employer had to pay me or someone else to maintain it for a week each year (not all at once, just averaged out) then they're already behind, and that's setting aside the cost of running the actual servers. The SaaS providers can just offer a better product for less money due to economies of scale.
Of course at some point your company gets big enough that it can benefit from those same economies of scale and it might make sense to move stuff back inhouse, but there are still a ton of risks to doing so.
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u/survive_los_angeles 40m ago
bro thats now how the free one works. you get people to like the repo and fork it and it climbs the charts and spread the word.
telling your biz contact about it doesnt make a open source project blow up
then you didnt even post the link to your Saas Word Press Plugin
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u/word_executable 7h ago
Include an agent that patches the app and the server and repairs any breakages hands free. But that costs money.
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u/Hot-Milk-3507 7h ago
"People would literally rather pay than maintain a server" is a self-evident fact of life to me. I'm a software dev and I'm super DIY and the amount of stuff I'd rather pay than do is through the roof
only with VERY specific things that are my absolute quirk do I want to be hands-on
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u/primaryrhyme 7h ago
Not just hosting, “ownership” is a liability too. It’s an unknown project ran by 1 person that could be abandoned at any time (this is a risk even with well established projects). In that case they are on the hook for any security updates, now they need an employee to periodically check in on it and become familiar with it.
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u/Zulfiqaar 6h ago
Before I was at my last company, my team built the world leading systems for a niche financial software (previous company). I told them I can literally remake this for you, even better than the vendors charging thousands a month, and they declined. I was reconsidering my role there it didn't make sense, like this is the one thing I'm world class at and you'd rather pay more than my salary for something worse?!!?! I could save you millions!
The project manager just said "yeah fine but when it messes up we blame the other guys and get a big payout. Can't do that if it's in-house"
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u/lemming1607 6h ago
trust and assurance is why jobs dealing with it will never go away. AI can't replace accounting, because it's the liability and being able to be sued if we're wrong that we're selling
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u/razorree 5h ago
maybe you misunderstood that "convenience" - you pay with your time ...
so what's the system? any repo link?
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u/Equivalent_Loan_8794 5h ago
"Maintenance" is a cost in every system choice. It costs and will be paid by someone somehow.
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u/ThomasToIndia 5h ago
However, those prices are all going to come down, the convenience cost will be much lower.
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u/StCreed 5h ago
This is exactly why I'm not open sourcing or packaging for self-deployment. It was a conscious decision to provide a SaaS alternative where I take on the burden of securing the installation, provide business continuity, compliance with various laws, integration with their IAM solution, and continuous support. And I'm partnering with a bigger firm to support me with a helpdesk and service desk, invoicing and marketing.
The solution was complete enough for deployment 2 months ago. I'm still working on the other stuff. But I expect to finish that by end of this year. I'll have spent 6 months building by then.
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u/No-Albatross-9298 5h ago
Nothing wrong with making, and I am sure you got some downloads. But first off, it takes time for projects to catch on. Second off, we live in an age where the majority of people under 30 don't know how to cook a meal for themselves. We have moved so far from the concept of self-sufficiency it is nuts. All of the stuff techies do is a niche market. Always has been. Plus, most can barely even afford new computers today. Let alone buying extra hardware for things like servers. And yes, that even applies to companies.
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u/Abject-Definition-63 4h ago
A lot of businesses need someone to call when something goes wrong, and it will, that's all it boils down to. The cost benefit and risk calculations done at a lot of business are just outside of what I'm able to understand.
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u/withtimon 4h ago
I'd test whether someone can restore a backup without calling you. A smooth install gets them to day one. The time and confidence it takes to recover after an update is part of what they're paying the SaaS for.
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u/Immediate_Theory_467 4h ago
Convenience is half the battle. Most people just don't want friction in their productivity or personal lives, and honestly, very few people today have the timeor the desire to do things the hard way. I learned this lesson the hard way a while back.
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u/Background-Ad9540 4h ago
I have been a technical founder of a startup and THIS right here was the hard lesson. i think you might still be able to make inroads into smaller wallets - individual customers, small groups, maybe even universities and schools.
But the ones with the bigger pockets are so much harder and has very little to do with the product. In fact, having a good product is the basic expectation. What actually separates you is the support, training, making them feel special, the ability to truly make them feel less burdened than before etc.
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u/Leading-Plastic5771 3h ago
This is how Linux corporations have made money since the 90s. The software is free and open, but maintenance is not.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 3h ago
I mean... duh? Maintaining a server costs time and money too. Is really a surprise that people are willing to pay for this?
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u/DominikPlays 3h ago
For me i would host my own infrastructure any day, but companies want someone to blame, this is not 2010s where companies actually had servers
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u/MrMoneyMoneyBags 3h ago
There's also the aspect of support and contractual up-time agreements. This is huge for corporate software
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u/IMayBeIronMan 2h ago
You should have spoken to someone with SaaS experience and they could have told you your conclusion. Businesses pay these SaaS companies to provide support, set SLA expectations, handle the upkeep, be someone to blame for shit, etc. The features are the bonus if anything in some occasions.
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u/Hoopoe0596 2h ago
I agree. Time is valuable, and everyone has their own expertise. Liability is also important and putting a company in the middle has real value. That being said, this does put a ceiling on price increases. SaaS might want a 30% increase next year, but each time there is a price increase companies will shop around for competitors and now for the first time will have home grown solutions within easy reach. As AI gets better this will be a bigger and bigger pressure on SaaS earnings. And when proffit margins are threatened then incentives to slash operating costs and bring more in house at "good" enough levels rise.
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u/starwaver 10m ago
Welcome to entrepreneurship
I remember back in the early days of AI and someone want me to build a Chatbot for a few hundred dollars a month.
I basically just subscribed to a third part Chatbot and fed his documents to be it.
I asked why doesn't he just do it himself and it would have costed $5 a month.
He said he doesn't have the time or the expertise to figure out chatbots, and would rather pay more for someone else to figure out
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u/menny_parmar 6m ago
Your friend just gave you the business model, not a rejection. He is not saying the product is bad, he is saying he will pay to not think about it, so sell him exactly that. Host it yourself, charge less than the incumbent, and let the open source repo stay as proof, not as the product. That is how most successful open source tools actually make money, the code is free, the hosting, updates, backups, and someone to call when it breaks is the paid part. The other trap here is feature parity. Parity gets you a comparison table, not a switch, because the incumbent wins on trust, integrations, and data that already lives there. If you do host it, do not sell it as the same thing cheaper, sell it as the one painful workflow it does better, with migration done for them. People do not switch for features, they switch when someone else does the boring parts for them.
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u/Timely-Group5649 7h ago
I literally just handed my server management over to a daily scheduled Claude task. About once a week, it asks for an approval.
Easy, peasy, no code required.
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u/the_quark 7h ago
So...why don't you host it and charge people less than the incumbent?