Criticizing harmful practices doesn’t require building a replacement from scratch. Saying “just build your own SaaS company” is a deflection, not a real argument. We don’t demand people create alternative governments to criticize corruption or build new roads to complain about traffic systems. Some practices — like vendor lock-in or exploitative data handling — are worth rejecting simply because they’re harmful.
Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”
Hmmm.. not everyone is talented in keeping software up to date. A selling homemade earrings can use something like shopify or paypal or stripe easily.
Do you use visa or mastercard? That is SaaS.
The main thing govts need to do is to force companies to allow export/import transparently . But then small SaaS don't have man power to do this (even if they truly believe in cause).
and also penalize or jail both programmrs/CEO that use subscription model with cancellation fee for even cancellations. Lots of people in HN would even be against this - as they claim - I wrote the code only - following orders.
Also, markets often do come up with better, more ethical alternatives — but only after society pushes back against the harmful defaults. Ecologically, people used to say there was no alternative to burning oil or dumping waste into rivers. That didn’t make those practices okay — and change only came because they were first criticized, regulated, and in some cases outright banned. Progress doesn’t start with “there’s already a perfect alternative”; it starts with “this is no longer acceptable.”