The end of SaaS is the future of open source

Microsoft is turning off Skype in favour of... Teams. Then dropping a 25% price hike on top. Know anyone who loves using Teams?!

Yes, it's peak SaaS: when you’re forced into a clunky product, only to find yourself locked into a spiralling cost at no additional value.

Meanwhile, open source solutions are thriving. Look at Obsidian. There’s a team of just seven, yet over five million people use them daily. It has an ecosystem approach with extensive and flexible plugins, so if there’s a niche feature I desperately need, I can build it myself (or, more accurately, have ChatGPT hold my hand doing so). If I want to, I can also pay a fortune in API credit to use the latest model from Open AI.

By comparison, Notion locks me in with its tools, restricting me to using a mix of GPT-4 and Claude simply because it’s the cheapest mix for them.

That’s not the future of software I want. And if you’ve also been using slow, feature-bloated SaaS subscriptions that’s only going to cost you more tomorrow, at no additional value, I suspect you feel the same.

We’re about to see a massive resurgence of open source, anchored by commercial models that target the infrastructure layers (cloud, server services), rather than pinning down end users with zero flexibility.

Call it the “revenge of the nerds” moment.