The true history of SaaS: from buying software to renting it forever

There was a time when software was bought like a hammer. You paid once, took home a box with a CD, and it was yours. Forever. If the company that made it vanished the next day, your hammer kept working.

That era ended. And not by accident.

Act 1: the perpetual license (1980–2000)

The model was simple: a perpetual license plus, maybe, an annual support contract. The math was clear on both sides. The vendor shipped new versions every few years; you decided whether they were worth it. If not, you kept the old version, which was still yours.

The power was on the buyer's side: the decision to pay renewed itself only if the software improved.

Act 2: the cloud changed everything (2000–2015)

Salesforce had the idea that defined two decades: if software runs on our servers, there's nothing to buy — only something to rent. SaaS was born: monthly payment, browser access, automatic updates.

At first it was genuinely better. No installs, no own servers, no IT department. The problem came later, when everyone realized what it meant for the vendor: predictable recurring revenue. Wall Street's favorite metric. The goal stopped being "make a product so good they buy the next version" and became "make it impossible to leave".

Act 3: the lock-in era (2015–today)

Mature SaaS specialized in retaining, not improving. Per-seat prices that scale on their own. Basic features moved to the enterprise plan. Data exporters that somehow don't export what you need. Integrations that break if you leave.

The result: a mid-size company now pays for hundreds of subscriptions. Nobody knows exactly how many. Each one goes up 10% a year. And stopping payment means losing the tool and your data.

You bought a hammer every month for years. And you own no hammer.

Act 4: the cost collapsed

Meanwhile, something happened that the industry preferred not to mention: the cost of making and running software collapsed. Servers cost cents. Open source solved nearly every component. And AI pushed the cost of writing code to a fraction.

The rent stayed as if nothing had happened. Until now.

How the story ends

It ends the way it began: with software being yours again. Not in a box with a CD, but better: open source code you can run anywhere, or run on our cloud paying only what the infrastructure costs.

From renting forever to owning again. That's the new world. And if you look at history, it's not new at all: it's software returning to its nature.