Simon Willison's Weblog: saas

Headless everything for personal AI

2026-04-19T21:46:38+00:00

Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common:

Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse.

Evidently Marc Benioff thinks so too:

Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless.

If this model does take off it's going to play havoc with existing per-head SaaS pricing schemes.

I'm reminded of the early 2010s era when every online service was launching APIs. Brandur Leach reminisces about that time in The Second Wave of the API-first Economy, and predicts that APIs are ready to make a comeback:

Suddenly, an API is no longer liability, but a major saleable vector to give users what they want: a way into the services they use and pay for so that an agent can carry out work on their behalf. Especially given a field of relatively undifferentiated products, in the near future the availability of an API might just be the crucial deciding factor that leads to one choice winning the field.

Tags: apis, definitions, matt-webb, salesforce, saas, ai, brandur-leach

PlanetScale's classy retirement

2025-07-01T20:37:43+00:00

Sometimes a service with a free plan will decide to stop supporting it. I understand why this happens, but I'm often disappointed at the treatment of existing user's data. It's easy to imagine users forgetting about their old accounts, missing the relevant emails and then discovering too late that their data is gone.

Inspired by today's news about PlanetScale PostgreSQL I signed into PlanetScale and found I had a long-forgotten trial account there with a three-year-old database on their free tier. That free tier was retired in March 2024.

Here's the screen that greeted me in their control panel:

What a great way to handle retiring a free plan! My data is still there, and I have the option to spin up a database for 24 hours to help get it back out again.

Tags: databases, saas

Atlassian: “We’re Not Going to Charge Most Customers Extra for AI Anymore”. The Beginning of the End of the AI Upsell?

2025-05-13T15:52:09+00:00

Atlassian: “We’re Not Going to Charge Most Customers Extra for AI Anymore”. The Beginning of the End of the AI Upsell?

Jason Lemkin highlighting a potential new trend in the pricing of AI-enhanced SaaS:

Can SaaS and B2B vendors really charge even more for AI … when it’s become core? And we’re already paying $15-$200 a month for a seat? [...]

You can try to charge more, but if the competition isn’t — you’re going to likely lose. And if it’s core to the product itself … can you really charge more ultimately? Probably … not.

It's impressive how quickly LLM-powered features are going from being part of the top tier premium plans to almost an expected part of most per-seat software.

Via @jasonlk

Tags: atlassian, startups, saas, ai, generative-ai, llms

The economics of a Postgres free tier

2024-07-11T19:26:35+00:00

The economics of a Postgres free tier

Xata offer a hosted PostgreSQL service with a generous free tier (15GB of volume). I'm very suspicious of free tiers that don't include a detailed breakdown of the unit economics... and in this post they've described exactly that, in great detail.

The trick is that they run their free tier on shared clusters - with each $630/month cluster supporting 2,000 free instances for $0.315 per instance per month. Then inactive databases get downgraded to even cheaper auto-scaling clusters that can host 20,000 databases for $180/month (less than 1c each).

They also cover the volume cost of $0.10/GB/month - so up to $1.50/month per free instance, but most instances only use a small portion of that space.

It's reassuring to see this spelled out in so much detail.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: postgresql, startups, saas

Build v.s. buy: how billing models affect your internal culture

2020-12-13T17:28:00+00:00

Something to pay attention to when making a build v.s. buy decision is the impact that billing models will have on your usage of a tool.

Take logging for example. If you buy a log aggregation platform like Splunk Cloud or Loggly the pricing is likely based on the quantity of data you ingest per day.

This can set up a weird incentive. If you are already close to the limit of your plan, you'll find that engineers are discouraged from logging new things.

This can have a subtle effect on your culture. Engineers who don't want to get into a budgeting conversation will end up avoiding using key tools, and this can cost you a lot of money in terms of invisible lost productivity.

Tools that charge per-head have a similar problem: if your analytics tool charges per head, your junior engineers won't have access to it. This means you won't build a culture where engineers use analytics to help make decisions.

This is a very tricky dynamic. On the one hand it's clearly completely crazy to invest in building your own logging or analytics solutions - you should be spending engineering effort solving the problems that are unique to your company!

But on the other hand, there are significant, hard-to-measure hidden costs of vendors with billing mechanisms that affect your culture in negative ways.

I don't have a solution to this. It's just something I've encountered that makes the "build v.s. buy" decision a lot more subtle than it can first appear.

It's also worth noting that this is only a problem in larger engineering organizations. In a small startup the decision chain to "spend more money on logging" is a 30 second conversation with the founder with the credit card - even faster if you're the founder yourself!

Update: a process solution?

Thinking about this more, I realize that this isn't a technology problem: it's a process and culture problem. So there should be a process and cultural solution.

One thing that might work would be to explicitly consider this issue in the vendor selection conversations, then document it once the new tool has been implemented.

A company-wide document listing these tools, with clear guidance as to when it's appropriate to increase capacity/spend and a documented owner (individual or team) plus contact details could really help overcome the standard engineer's resistance to having conversations about budget.

This post started out as a comment on Hacker News.

Tags: saas, management

What are Good Conferences for SaaS Marketers?

2014-01-30T10:39:00+00:00

My answer to What are Good Conferences for SaaS Marketers? on Quora

Business of Software has a very good reputation.

Tags: conferences, quora, saas

Log Management: What is the complexity behind Loggly and similar services?

2013-12-02T16:34:00+00:00

My answer to Log Management: What is the complexity behind Loggly and similar services? on Quora

Pricing isn't about how hard it is to build something (and building a reliable, highly-scalable centralized log search and archiving system isn't trivial). It's about how much value it provides to the customer.

If you are a company that generates 7GB to 1.5TB of logging data per day, making those logs centralized and searchable is a big win for you, and is something that requires a decent amount of engineering effort. $350/month probably isn't much money for you - if you have more than a dozen or so employees it ends up as more or less a rounding error on your monthly expenses.

Compare that to building it yourself. Firstly, if you build it in-house, you have to maintain it. Can you do that on less than one engineer-day per month? Even if you can, what's the opportunity cost of them working on logging instead of things that actually help you solve the unique problems that characterise your business? And will the thing you build in-house be as good as the thing that Loggly (a company that only focuses on building excellent log processing software) can provide?

Tags: programming, quora, saas, splunk

Why do so many London based SAAS startups only price in dollars?

2013-11-02T11:58:00+00:00

My answer to Why do so many London based SAAS startups only price in dollars? on Quora

UK customers are used to paying for some things in dollars. US customers are likely to be very uncomfortable paying for something in a foreign currency. So if you are only going to support one currency at first, it makes sense to pick dollars.

Tags: startups, quora, saas

What should be my minimum requirements for a cutting edge SaaS business product?

2013-10-19T12:21:00+00:00

My answer to What should be my minimum requirements for a cutting edge SaaS business product? on Quora

That depends on your customers. If you're building software for banks or hospitals you probably need to support older versions of IE. If it's for software companies or web freelancers, requiring a modern browser version is fine.

Tags: business, quora, saas

What are the best ways to get traffic to my SAAS project management app?

2013-10-03T13:29:00+00:00

My answer to What are the best ways to get traffic to my SAAS project management app? on Quora

At your stage you won't be able to get meaningful paying customers from regular web traffic. You need to be building up your customer base manually, one at a time, through a high touch sales process.

If no one is paying for your product yet, how can you be sure that you've built something that people are willing to pay for? If you haven't yet achieved that, no amount of website traffic will result in meaningful conversions.

Once you do have some paying customers, you'll be able to start growing the service towards being able to attract self-service sign ups.

Firstly, you'll get much better feedback on what you need to improve and which aspects if your product are most valuable (and hence should be used to build your marketing message).

Secondly, you'll have actual paying customers who can in turn refer other paying customers. Having testimonials from real customers on your site is a powerful form of social proof, essential for getting other potential customers to take you seriously.

Finally, having active users will spread word of your product. Every time someone using basecamp invites a new collaborator to their project, that's potentially one new person who has heard if basecamp. Your product can gain from the same kind of viral loop.

Tags: startups, web-development, quora, saas

What are some early examples of SaaS?

2013-09-30T09:58:00+00:00

My answer to What are some early examples of SaaS? on Quora

37 Signals' Basecamp was one of the pioneers if modern SaaS back in 2004.

Tags: 37signals, enterprise, entrepreneurship, startups, quora, saas

What is "Software-as-a-Service"?

2013-09-23T13:45:00+00:00

My answer to What is "Software-as-a-Service"? on Quora

Software which is hosted for you by the providing company, so you don't need to install and manage it on your own servers.

It's commonly paid for on a subscription basis, usually monthly or annually.

Tags: quora, saas

What is a good, simple SaaS tool for testing SOAP calls?

2013-09-23T13:20:00+00:00

My answer to What is a good, simple SaaS tool for testing SOAP calls? on Quora

I doubt you'll find one. The words "Simple" and "SOAP" don't deserve to appear in the same sentence, and SOAP is massively unfashionable these days (for good reason) so you're unlikely to find any modern SaaS companies developing tools for it.

Tags: soap, quora, saas

What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool?

2013-09-23T09:02:00+00:00

My answer to What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool? on Quora

Pros: if you can afford it and are completely incapable of hiring an in-house development team, it will get a version of your software built.

Cons: you'll quickly discover that building a SaaS product is a process that starts the day you launch it (and start getting feedback from real users). Without in-house developers you won't be able to iterate on the product, which means you won't be able to improve it and evolve it in to the product people actually want.

That's not to say you can't have your in-house development team based in another country, but you'll need to learn how to hire and manage that kind of team, which is a massive additional set of challenges - and building a SaaS company is hard enough without making it any harder!

Tags: quora, saas

What are key considerations when building behind the firewall web apps?

2013-09-15T15:24:00+00:00

My answer to What are key considerations when building behind the firewall web apps? on Quora

CSRF and XSS are still important: don't leave any security vulnerabilities which might allow an evil website out on the internet to run JavaScript that steals data from your behind-the-firewall web application.

Tags: csrf, enterprise, software-engineering, webapps, quora, saas

What are some websites that can help me have people upvote or downvote a list of ideas?

2013-08-12T09:48:00+00:00

My answer to What are some websites that can help me have people upvote or downvote a list of ideas? on Quora

Any web framework would be capable of this. In fact, it's such a simple project it's s great opportunity to build the same thing in more than one framework and find out for yourself which one you like best.

Stop thinking, start building!

Tags: quora, saas

What are some good analytics software for SAAS products? wrt to customer churn, segmentation of customers and product metrics

2013-07-06T16:23:00+00:00

My answer to What are some good analytics software for SAAS products? wrt to customer churn, segmentation of customers and product metrics on Quora

The two big ones at the moment are www.kissmetrics.com and www.mixpanel.com. They are both excellent, and both offer free trials... do I suggest giving both of them a go and seeing which one you find most useful.

Tags: quora, saas

What are people's top cloud business apps for 2014?

2011-12-24T14:22:00+00:00

My answer to What are people's top cloud business apps for 2014? on Quora

The combination of GitHub and Campfire has been working extremely well for us.

Tags: cloud, webapps, quora, saas, crm