OccupySaaS — They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS.
occupysaas.com
Clean-room, AI-assisted, open-source, drop-in replacements for the SaaS giants. Apache-2.0. Self-hosted. No per-seat tax.

I saw some discussion about this elsewhere. Here is how the project describes itself:

OccupySaaS is a protest movement in code: laid-off developers building clean-room, open-source, drop-in replacements for the SaaS giants. First up: ZeroAuthy (Auth0) and SalesCompel (Salesforce).

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street asked who the economy was really working for. In 2026 we’re asking the same question about the cloud. The tools every company runs on are now toll booths — and the people who built them were shown the door.

Two towers occupied.

Identity and CRM: the two subscriptions almost every company pays for and almost nobody loves. ZeroAuthy has shipped its first release candidate, SalesCompel is still early, and both welcome contributors today.

Who’s next?

Every category on this board is a monthly invoice somewhere. The movement picks the next target in public — bring a spec, a use case, or a grudge.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 hours ago

    this smells a lot like vibes

    Forgive me, but you must be pretty far from software development to equate any use of AI in software engineering with “vibe coding.”

    In the hands of capable engineers, AI is a powerful tool that can be used responsibly to save time or eliminate tedious work. It doesn not have to be used blind and it doesn’t always dig an inescapable hole.

    “Vibe coding” is when people without engineering competency fake their way through it with AI. It’s really a very different situation. The difference between aerospace engineering and a landlord special.

    These seem like capable engineers with a lot of energy and experience. I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt. If anything, this is the most legit and inspiring use case for AI I’ve seen in a while.

    And for people saying that they are just using the AI products of the companies that dropped them… again they must be far from the industry. There’s a small handful of companies building the leading models and those are not the companies that laid these people off. There is a huge world of SAAS companies like Altlassian and Salesforce and thousands more you’ve never heard of who build business productivity software - bloated, shitty, overpriced crap that’s ripe for displacement. Nothing to do with LLM vendors.

    • blueryth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 hours ago

      Forgive me

      No. Almost all of this response is laughable, and has the same stench as the project. I was polite, I wish well-meaning projects well, and if it weren’t for the absurd evangelism that someone else might trip over and be swayed by, I’d just leave this be.

      These are not high-profile developers. We don’t know their energy or their experience. We owe them nothing. And whatever this is

      If anything, this is the most legit and inspiring use case for AI I’ve seen in a while.

      is completely ridiculous.

      And for people saying that they are just using the AI products of the companies that dropped them… again they must be far from the industry. There’s a small handful of companies building the leading models and those are not the companies that laid these people off. There is a huge world of SAAS companies like Altlassian and Salesforce and thousands more you’ve never heard of who build business productivity software - bloated, shitty, overpriced crap that’s ripe for displacement. Nothing to do with LLM vendors.

      Take this meandering crap back to the bot and ask it to narrow it in on an actual point. There is no path for Claude to liberate anyone from platform capture. It’s intrinsic to the platform Claude itself. CRM will be free from Salesforce, and we’ll still owe Anthropic for the tokens. Perhaps a noble goal, but there’s no freedom in trading one master for another.