In business you should focus more on how much you can make than on how much you can save.

If you are lucky to have talented staff on your payroll, they should put their hard work into things which increase business revenue and profit, not things which reduce expenses. Unless there's an expense which is outrageous.

If that engineer in the article example can build a Salesforce clone, then he can instead build more valuable software which the business can sell for a profit. It could be a Salesforce clone even.

I feel like my HN comments fall now into 3 categories :

- free software exists since the 80s, having software that costs literally 0, not even being "very cheap" is NOT new

- Goodhart's law where we get a new KPI only to make the entire process and ecosystem around it pointless

- the rest (but it's rare)

so... yeah this one is option #1.

Not everyone is a 200k engineer. Even kids with some hacker skills or university students with time > salary, who have access to LLM's, will start making cheaper alternatives and get into business that way for themselves.

I get this a lot. Yeah, you can have an LLM copy what I've built, no it's not going to be as good unless you also spend the equivalent of the amount of hours I've spent on it.

Not a SalesForce dev, but there is a bit of oversimplification what CRM SaaS is today.

Almost everything integrates with SF today and most often understanding, replicating and maintaining these integration pathways may need more than 1.5 engineers. You then bring 3 engineers (to cover absences) and buy enough tokens.

And we haven't even scratched other parts: disaster recovery, security, legal (CCPA/GDPR), etc

Corporations will be quite happy with really simple features if they're packaged right. I'm selling software that mostly does things that a good programmer could whip up in a couple of days or weeks, but what cost me most of the development time wasn't the features but all the FUD around them e.g. SSO, multitenancy, audit logs, corporate design support, ... Most enterprise software could be replaced with simple scripts and command line tools if they had this enterprise layer. I'd wager tons of SaaS is just simple open-source software and libraries behind a management layer.

But software is never sold to endusers, only licensed

There's another dimension to the Salesforce CRM "build" argument; which is to reduce your 25 seats down to 5, and expend Eng resources to building "agents" to automate many recurring data-entry CRM tasks.

This is also the reason the stock has hit a 3-year low. Not because CRM can be replaced entirely. But because the seat count can be reduced 50%+.

1.) your site looks gorgeous 2.) so does the Bulgarian scene from the top, added it to my list 3.) excellent thinking, I'm wishing you good luck

Good luck on your new endeavour! Selling to devs is hard, did you consider building in public? That would def help get traction imo. Your point about considering API design and overall architecture would definitely differentiate among the all AI slop out there