Kill Your SaaS
A manifesto for SaaS repatriation
I. Your Data = Training Data
Your internal data is now the most valuable asset you have, and you're giving it away while paying $20/seat/month for the privilege. SaaS vendors are no longer just hosting your data, they're learning from it.
II. Beyond the Vibes
DIY CRMs are great, but just one part of the solution. Your observability stack? Your database? Your LLM? That cracked engineer isn't going to code it all in a weekend. Open source will proliferate, commercial vendors offer complete self-hosted solutions. This movement includes it all.
III. Agents with Neckbeards
The cost of creating software is trending to zero, what happens when that comes to operating software? Agents start as hands on keyboards, and will evolve to 24/7 sysadmins/SREs as we give them the skills needed to migrate configuration, data, workflows etc as well as operate these apps and infra reliably. This will only get better.
IV. Agents Thrive with Root
To make software truly agent-friendly as the user, start from first principles. Agents need transparent access to systems, not just interfaces. Saas strugles to provide this because of the inherent trust boundary. Self-hosted software operates within trusted environments, so it naturally exposes logs, databases, queues, config, infra, and often source. This level of access and transparency makes self-hosted software highly legible and operable to agents out of the box.
It's time to repatriate your apps back to where your data already resides.