Why Open Source Might be the Right Call for Your Business
Open source is utilized by Fortune 500 companies to build technology stacks that you are currently depending on as SaaS. A partnership with Kraken gives all of the benefits of using open source– reliability, modern standards, and open file formats– without the burden of maintaining & building your technology stack from scratch. We can help you reduce your SaaS and proprietary vendor subscription fees by up to 40% with open source.
A Perpetual Subscription Model
If you’ve ever used a cloud service provider to manage a core aspect of your business, you know the feeling. You pay a subscription fee every month. It might start out low– however, as soon as you find yourself needing a certain feature or workflow, you click the menu link to find it locked behind a paywall– demanding that you upgrade your subscription tier. When another critical workflow presents itself, it too is locked behind a paywall. It soon begins to feel as though you spend more time looking at a payment screen than you do looking at your own business data. You have just discovered the core business model of proprietary SaaS providers– lure business owners in with low initial pricing, then lock essential workflows and features behind rising subscription tiers.
But wait, there’s more. When you sign with a cloud SaaS provider, someone else has control of your core business data in perpetuity. Their downtime is your downtime. Even if you do have a file saved on your computer, it’s often trapped behind a proprietary database format, a closed API, or custom architecture designed to prevent you from exporting it elsewhere. And if you want to stop paying their monthly subscription fee? You lose access to the only tool that can decode it properly. Using open source from the beginning mitigates this risk entirely.
What Nobody Tells You About Open Source
Open source is a great strategy to reach escape velocity from expensive SaaS vendors and cloud subscription fees– however, there is a hidden burden that few providers discuss openly. It must be configured & maintained properly to achieve optimal performance. A simple web server configuration could take weeks to months to fine-tune in order to achieve the best possible performance. Our website wasn’t built in a day– we spent months engineering, hardening, and maintaining our custom WordPress stack, so that our page loads in less than a second on desktop browsers, and less than 3 seconds on a mobile device.
Second, the sheer number of open source packages available on most Linux distributions is absolutely bewildering. Most are high quality, production-level packages. Others… not so much. It’s completely unrealistic to expect anyone to sift through 10,000+ software packages to determine what ERP system is going to work best for your workflows– on top of trying to manage a business operation, employees, and keeping clients satisfied– unless that person already has decades of experience with open source package selection. Partnering with Kraken means that you’ll be gaining a trusted advisor with two decades of solid, proven experience in selecting open source packages to fit your needs– and zero lock-in.
The Tech Blueprint Challenge
You don’t have to pay a consultant thousands of dollars just to find out what software fits your business needs. Tell us about your operational workflows, employee headcount, and compliance needs, and we will provide a tailored software package recommendation– including whether to use FreeBSD or a Linux distribution, and a complete open-source software stack– at no charge to you.
We will tell you exactly what enterprise-grade software packages will reliably replace your expensive SaaS subscriptions, with zero vendor lock-in.
If your team chooses to deploy it internally, the blueprint is yours to keep. When you just want it built right, without the hassle of setting everything up, we will happily conduct an on-site assessment, environment evaluation, and deliver a transparent, flat-rate quote for complete configuration, security hardening, and on-site implementation. We don’t add surprise hourly overages or hidden fees– just hardened, production-ready infrastructure.