SaaS is just vendor lock-in with better branding

Summary

SaaS Is Just Vendor Lock-In with Better Branding Developers are told "to focus on the product" and let SaaS vendors handle the rest, but integrating third-party services, whether it's auth, queuing, file storage, or image optimization, comes at a cost. Not just in dollars but in time, friction, and mental overhead. There are five hidden taxes you pay every time you integrate a SaaS into your stack. 1. The Discovery Tax Before you can integrate anything, you first have to figure out what they're actually selling? What problems are they solving? Is it compatible with your stack? Is their price sane at your scale? a Are their docs clear and do they reveal any implementation weirdness? This unpaid research work is usually non-transferable. What you learn about "Uploady" or "MegaQueue" doesn't help you next time when you're evaluating something else. It's also subjective. It's marketing, and does the marketing message resonate with you? 2. The Sign-Up Tax You've decided on a service, and this is the moment when you hand over your email and credit card. Do they support usage-based pricing or only lock-in tiers? Can your team members access the dashboard, or do you have to pay more for that functionality? Despite only using the service the same amount! Can you even test the product without hitting a paywall? You're now on the hook, even if you haven't written a single line of code. 3. The Integration Tax Now the real work begins. You read the docs. You install the libraries You wire it into your framework. And figure out the edge cases that the docs don't mention, because docs are marketing! Often you're left fighting your own tooling. They're aiming for the lowest common denominator, and you're bleeding edge. Or the other way around! 4. The Local Development Tax You need the SaaS service to work locally. Does it even offer a local emulator? Can you stub it out in tests? Do you need to tunnel to the cloud just to test one feature? Now you've got branching configuration log...