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OccupySaaS — They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS. (occupysaas.com)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by chleb@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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OccupySaaS is protest movement written in code.

Story is simple. Many engineers got laid off in tech. But the SaaS platforms they built keep growing and keep charging per seat. So the same industry rent our own work back to us. This project is answer to that. Laid off engineers use AI and public documentation to rebuild those platforms as free open source drop-in replacements. One seat at a time.

Method is clean room. Public docs only, open standards, public SDK behaviour. No leaked code, no decompile, no confidential info from former employer. AI help with build, humans write spec and review every change. Compatible is proven by running vendors own public SDKs against the server. If your existing code dont work unchanged, it is not done.

Two early releases: ZeroAuthy ( Auth0 compatible identity server) and SalesCompel( Salesforce compatible CRM)

They are early, not production ready yet. But the goal is the point.

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[-] criss_cross@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago

This is something that my current company is learning the hard way sadly.

You don’t pay saas companies for a code base. You pay them for maintenance, hosting, and figuring out complexity for you.

Vibe coded stuff is garbage because the only thought that went into it was a 5 minute “build this for me”.

[-] bearforcepilot@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I think also, people forget that open source projects need maintainers who are properly invested.

It's difficult to imagine a meaningful future for a codebase that you spun up with AI and don't actually understand yourself.

There's an expectation of stewardship beyond "yeah I spent 2k on tokens"

[-] WhiskeyNeon@lemmy.zip 13 points 4 days ago

This 100%. I worked for an enterprise software vendor and even though our product was expensive and open source options existed that did the same thing, the support, maintenance, compliance certifications, etc is what people pay for. The vibe-coded clones might get feature parity, but now support and compliance is totally on the teams using the software.