Software as a Disservice – How SaaS is Wrecking the Online Marketing Industry

So, as we might all know, times are pretty tough in the economy. Grocery store prices are ridiculous, and many people aren’t quite sure what they’re going to do.

Like, isn’t it weird that things are getting super expensive, but most regular people aren’t quite sure where the money is going?

I can tell you where it’s going… Monthly subscription fees to cloud computing companies.

Monthly subscription fees are everywhere it seems, and as someone who dabbles a little in computers, it doesn’t make any sense.

Like, no one is putting any effort into a lot of things that they aren’t keeping updated. Yet, after looking at the prices of things like AWS, it’s no wonder why these pieces of software cost so much money.

I’ve been around the programming block a little bit, and I can tell you that these expensive pieces of software that do the same thing as Back SEO Agencies, are expensive for a reason, and it’s not the reason you think it is.

What Does SaaS Even Mean?

So, software-as-a-service means that when you pay the SaaS provider, they allow you to use their software, usually on their servers.

For example, when you use SEMRush, you log into your account, and when you want to get a website audit report, you’re utilizing their servers to run it.

That’s how it should be, right?

Most companies don’t actually use their own servers.

They use AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or another cloud service provider. Because “it’s more scalable”.

Sure… If you want to hoard data, and want to fleece out the end-consumer, it is more scalable.

Computer Power Isn’t Free, but Electricity Mostly is for Consumers

So, as you might know, you have an electric bill each month. That electric bill is going to get paid each month, and you very likely use a computer often… At least if you’re reading an article related to SEO and SaaS.

So, I’m on the computer pretty often. I usually just turn it to sleep, or leave it on. It’s never made much of a difference, even when I don’t use my computer. At $60/month in the winter, and $120/month in the summer, the reason for my electric bill being high definitely isn’t my computer.

BUT, if I wanted to run a computer of similar specs to mine (8-Cores, 16-Threads, 16gb RAM, 512gb SATA SSD, Nvidia RTX 2070) all day, every day on AWS, it’ll cost me significantly more than $120/month.

Just running it on its own.

Now, like I said, I run my computer all day every day, and it’s lasted me well over 5 years now.

This computer cost me roughly $1,000.

So, in 10 months, buying a new personal computer is cheaper than running a service “in the cloud”.

SaaS Companies aren’t 100% at Fault

Everyone got advertised the cloud. It’s a neat idea and makes cross-platform easy!

Except, it’s not really cross-platform. You’re just using someone else’s computer to run operations, then it sends you a web-page back with the information.

And yes, it’s probably running Linux.

That’s the basis of any web-based application. If you’re using an API key, you’re pinging someone else’s computer to do the computational work for you.

And cloud provided computing is expensive. Very, very expensive.

Okay, they might be at fault

But why would anyone want to create a B2B web-app? You’re using the program every day, right?

It’s because they want you to pay monthly.

Think about it.

Once someone buys a piece of software, they only get paid once.

But if someone buys the service of a software (AKA renting) they have to pay you over and over again to use it.

Personally, I hate monthly subscriptions.

When I buy something, I want to own it, unless you’re doing something extra for me.

Like when renting an apartment, I don’t have to worry about mowing the lawn, or making sure the pool is cleaned. It’s kinda nice having a community of people pay for the upkeep of these things, and overall costs significantly less than if everyone paid for it on their own.

But for something like software, I know that 99% of the time, stuff isn’t getting updated. GIMP rarely needs to be updated, and it’s free, right?

So why the heck does Adobe Photoshop cost so much EVERY MONTH?

It used to not. But then they got greedy, found out that people didn’t need them after they bought their product, and decided to fleece their customers for a monthly fee.

So it is their fault that they now are locked into the cloud, the cloud’s fees (which yes, they can go up as inflation and people’s wages go up).

So now you’re plan, remember how you started at $0/month, but then started paying $12/month for Photoshop? Yeah, that’s subject to increase as cloud costs increase. Now it’s like, $22/month.

Ridiculous.

But that’s just one of the costs of SaaS.

But Wait… There’s More

So let’s say, for instance, that you like to use SurferSEO. What happens if they ever go out of business?

What happens to all of the reports that you created in that application?

Well, they’re gone. You never owned them. You never owned any of the data that you put into the software. Including your clients.

Yes, you putting your client’s information into SurferSEO fed them more data for them to own.

Read the Privacy Policy.

You don’t own $*%#. You own “The right to present the information as it is given”.

And you also give them your company’s information, too. And your clients. You give them permission to scrape your website “for auditing purposes” and then they can use the data YOU GAVE IT to help your competitors.

Isn’t that kinda shady? Take your data, sell you your competitors data, then sell your data to your competitors?

Haha, but it gets even better

You also can’t protect the data the way you want.

If I don’t want to put a password on my computer, that’s on me, right?

What about me giving admin credentials to my server that I host all of my client’s data on, right? Only I should have that right, y’know?

If I give out my credentials to my server, I know that only I am going to be harmed. No one else’s information is in my computer.

But what about if Ahref’s got hacked?

A LOT of people put their information in Ahref’s, and also their clients trusted marketing information.

Now it’s hacked. You had 0 control over that, right?

All that data, now gone. And you couldn’t even control it.

Okay, Andrew. The Internet is dangerous. We know this, what can we do?

Well, that’s where I think the power of internet marketing has gone too far. It’s become far too normalized to just use someone else’s computer for everything.

It costs so much to do that, and we all already have a computer.

And computers, believe it or not, are FREAKING FAST.

“My Computer Isn’t Fast”

BS, your operating system with a lot of bloatware isn’t fast.

Unless you’re on a Raspberry Pi, or a single board computer, chances are that your computer is plenty fast. You’re just running windows or Chrome OS, which are significantly more compute-heavy and bloated than Ubuntu.

But even then, if you’re using a web-app, you still have to deal with the bloat of a browser… And the ping latency.

Removing the browser bloat and ping latency by running a native application locally makes your computer feel SO. F’ING. FAST.

So Your Point Is?

My point is this:

Using someone else’s computer is slower than doing it on your own. For most SEO tasks, you can use your own computer.

Like, an SEO audit isn’t too difficult to do. You don’t need to know the exact rank of a page for multiple keywords to determine what you need to do to the page in order to SEO optimize it.

Those added things just make the program slower, and honestly are just ways to add features, without giving you anything of value so that you pay more.

I mean, honestly, who here has used a backlink checker, just to never try to obtain backlinks from those sites?

Instead of using your time to analyze backlinks of your competition, get backlinks of your own.

Write your own Medium articles.

Reach out to news companies with an article already written for a client, and say “hey, here’s a news story about my client”, and who knows, maybe they’ll run it.

Or call them up with a little giveaway.

I got off track

Those kinds of features honestly don’t even matter when it comes to SEO. Everyone has just been fed this lie of “you need Big Data in order to market well” and that’s simply not true.

I do not care how much of my competitor’s information you know. That doesn’t get me results.

But I do know that it’s something everybody is always curious about.

Let me tell you, that kind of marketing is completely dead.

Only 5 kinds of sites exist on the internet now that matter for backlinks.

1. Social Media (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, etc.)
2. Search Engines (Google/Apple/Microsoft News/Discover/Maps/Shopping/Ads)
3. News Outlets (Every large metropolitan area has their own local stations, which you can submit stories to, and they’re all desperate for content all the freaking time)
4. Directory Sites (These all feed into maps)
5. Commerce listing sites (Things like Uber Eats, Amazon, ebay, TikTok Shop, all these apps congregate and get real results for real local clients.)

If you’re doing Local SEO as an agency, or local marketing, you’ll have to learn how all of these things works. It’s not that hard.

Do the things that get real results for real people.

Just do local marketing, then naturally the Local SEO will follow.

So you’re telling me to stop all marketing subscriptions?

For SaaS, pretty much, yeah. Buy Back SEO Agencies so that you can easily report to your clients what their rankings are in search engines.

Then proceed to do the “grunt work” of Local SEO, which is just following this simple pricing chart.

That’s it. If you need any more explanations on this checklist, and how to do it, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I’ll teach you everything there.

You can expect the full video course to be completed by May 1, 2024. I’m just starting this out to teach people how I successfully get clients to rank in search engines, as well as marketing local clients full time without having to spend too much of your own money.

It saves you money, it saves your clients money. Try it out! Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter as well for 20% off Back SEO Agencies. Available on Windows 10 & 11.