Hey {{first name | there}}. In my last newsletter, I spoke about some of the challenges and some of my thoughts around the rise in builders.
But a small subset of that topic is the rise in personal software and some of the arguments around SaaS being dead.
In today's technical notes:
Build vs buy, all over again
The upfront cost I already paid
The opportunity cost the headlines miss
🧠TOGETHER WITH EVERYTHINGDEVOPS
Some tech skills are much harder to turn into a job than people realise.
So we ranked the most common beginner skills from S tier to F tier based on four things: how quickly you can become useful, how high the earning ceiling is, how exposed the skill is to AI, and where it can take you next.
If you're starting from zero in 2026, this should help you decide what to learn first.
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📰Technical notes: Opportunity cost of personal software
To start off, personally, I do not think SaaS is dead, as I will elaborate below. However, I do think basic economics can tell us a lot about the narrative that no one will pay for software.
So… build or buy?
If you've run software at any reasonable scale, you'd recall the classic build vs. buy.
Do we pay X amount a month, or pay this vendor to solve the issue for us?
The "true value" of a lot of software isn't inherently how much you do with it, but how much you don't have to do with it.
Okay, I am guilty too
Haha, you got me
Obviously, I have fallen guilty of building my own apps. In the last year alone, I have built several small tools to help with my work and even my personal life.
The reason I am able to do this to a sane degree is because I have paid some of the upfront cost.
As an example, I host a small app to send me Telegram notifications when a p2p file transfer is done. This app is available to my private network via Tailscale, and I am happy with it.
But the cost here was:
Paying a couple of $ to purchase the computers and networking
The router I had to buy to isolate my homelab
As well as some other misc items
Now if a solution comes by and says "hey, pay $5/month to do this instead", does it mean it's useless?
To me, maybe not so useful, because I have a setup that works and going forward I am fine maintaining the app.
Where this leaves you
Scaling this up slightly, say I vibed up a service to make payments, and I want to pitch it to my company. Before I get far enough, someone from legal would likely hit me with "Is this compliant?"
Now I am faced with a choice:
Go the SOC 2 (or <insert your preferred compliance>) route, or adopt a vendor who is well established in the field.
This is the opportunity cost the catchy headlines are failing to factor in.
🌍IN THE ECOSYSTEM
What is Wrong with GitHub by Jacob Bachmeyer and Richard Stallman. Argues that GitHub's nonfree JavaScript, Copilot, and GitHub-only features like pull requests and Actions turn Git's distributed model into a walled garden, and makes the case for hosting elsewhere.
I am sorry, but you still have to think by Piotr Sarnacki. Uses DHH's AI-generated Campfire rewrites in Rust, Elixir, and Go to show that vague prompts leave the real trade-offs (latency, memory, backwards compatibility) to chance.
The engineer to OF girlie pipeline. On engineers now being expected to sell a personality alongside the product, and how that hype can end up making the product an excuse for the story.
⏱️UNTIL NEXT TIME
That's it for this one. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, or a different take, hit reply, I read every response.
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Jubril Oyetunji
CTO, EverythingDevOps