I like your conversation with Scott Ford. I also have a small software co (just me) servicing legacy codebases, and am feeling the pinch from big low-code/no-code/big SaaS solutions. I agree that from a business perspective, they make alot of sense. Maintaining (and staffing for) legacy is becoming more and more risky for them.

I’ve finally concluded that for myself, fighting the trend towards SaaS is trying to sandbag the tide. I am even encouraging and helping clients to make the transition. However, I really do not enjoy working with these platforms (like BigCommerce and Shopify). Going from having full view and control of the stack, to having very limited control of a “black box” is a little like trying to develop sites with one of those claw machines at the arcade.

Scott had a particularly interesting outlook on no-code/low-code platforms…that businesses will hit the ceiling of what they can do. I feel that as well. While these giant SaaS apps have many features and plugins (some good, some NOT good) for many different use cases, every business will have its own business requirements which are not adequately addressed by anything you can drag and drop into your site. In those circumstances, the hacks and workarounds that need to be developed are monstrous, and create so much “technical debt” and complexity. Already, I have to build so much middleware to “bolt on” features, the mental model is WAY more complex than the monolithic architecture they migrated from.