On Business Models

Some time ago I read some news that made me think a lot about business models. Modern services are most of the time a non-sense business model; the vast majority is either free, or ads supported, or subscription-based. All of these models are not OK for most of the cases.

A note before starting: this is a very opinionated post that I wrote some time ago for my personal blog. I’m publishing this again because things have not improved at all; to the contrary, they are getting worse and worse.

  • free apps or services are just nonsense because building software costs a lot. No one can afford to create and develop quality software for free. If they claim so, you can be sure it is a scam to trick users into something (usually trading personal data for cat pictures) and should be avoided like the plague. Perfect examples are social networks;

Of course, our society requires us to break some of the rules. For instance in Europe is almost impossible to live without WhatsApp, which is a nonsense-free app with a stellar implementation and an outstanding service. As a developer, I cannot help but admire its quality, but as a user, I must be scared because their business model is shady, at best.

Recently, I started Saasform, an open-source authentication framework that is specifically aimed at Saas, that deeply integrates the subscription-based approach. I hope that by reducing the technical difficulties and the friction necessary to set up a Saas, the number of good business models will increase.

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Fullstack dev with 15 years of experience. Now working on saasform.dev an open source authentication framework. Prior I earned a Ph.D in computer security

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Davide Vernizzi

Fullstack dev with 15 years of experience. Now working on saasform.dev an open source authentication framework. Prior I earned a Ph.D in computer security