Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return to installable apps?

Re:Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return ... by raw_anon_1111 on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @01:34PM (#45903968)

And what do you think happens when a company that is already in that market or an adjacent one gets a whiff of some junior developers product? They just throw a few devs at it and use their existing sales organization and add it as a feature.

Don’t mistake a feature and a product - stolen and paraphrased from what Steve Jobs said about Dropbox. He was right, just premature.

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Re:Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return ... by cyrusradfar on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @05:07PM (#45907499)

I think of pricing and packaging as a separate lever than product. Yes, if a big brand copies a solution and the one-time pricing and packaging -- they will take some of that group away.

The issue is that many times the company would LOSE existing revenue and that's often a non-starter during planning.

If your one-time price is $49.99, and their existing monthly fee is $19.99 per month, they're not going to offer a $49.99 option. It would harm their core business too much.

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Re:Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return ... by raw_anon_1111 on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @05:14PM (#45907575)

Of course they will. They will make a lower tier product that doesn’t have things that larger companies need - most of the time they keep something like SSO federation into a premium tier.

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Re:Ask HN: Do businesses want to leave the cloud and return ... by cyrusradfar on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @05:39PM (#45907879)

We're having a discussion on belief at this point. I appreciate your perspective and think, in many cases, your prediction would be right. In others, it won't. There's no determinism to these things.

The point of the discussion for me (can't speak for you) was to ask if there's an opportunity, and I am not deterred to think there is.

Is it easy, no. But it's straight forward to approach from a product perspective.

There's strategies one may deploy to make it harder or more painful for a big company to copy because they'd have to swallow a large number of downsells into the new offering.

Maybe the insight from this thread, is that one must consider high-value low-product-effort features that, often, force upsells in the cloud solution that one could offer in an installable one.

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