Eh... I think SaaS is just a more polished version of basically the same idea.

There absolutely is an upfront cost - a company has paid to create the software that enables that SaaS.

They are simply hiding that from view of the customer, and only offering a rental option.

You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.

But... it turns out it's less profitable to sell standalone software - so the vast majority of vendors are just quietly dropping that option and moving to subscription only licenses: SaaS.

Basically

> there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation.

Is entirely intentional, and exactly what the printer manufacturer wishes they could do - except they have the pesky problem of having to provide hardware that actually prints at some point. But it's DEFINITELY not the only way to sell software.

All these examples are missing the nefarious bait-and-switchy property to them like the printer example does. When you start using a managed SQL DB from GCP for instance there is no expectation whatsoever that you can use that offline. But you can still spin up a PostgreSQL and use that offline, no problem. No one can turn that off. Sure there are things like licensing but those have existed forever.

> You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.

That's not what Saas is usually considered though, at least in my experience. A note taking app needing a subscription to work isn't what I imagine this thread means when we talk about SaaS.