The Hidden Costs of SaaS: More Than You Think

Developers are often told to focus on their product and leave the rest to SaaS vendors. But integrating third-party services (authentication, queuing, file storage, image optimization, etc.) comes at a cost, not just in dollars but in time, friction, and mental overhead. This article outlines five hidden taxes: discovery tax (evaluating services), sign-up tax (registration and payment), integration tax (code integration and debugging), local development tax (local environment configuration), and production tax (production deployment and maintenance). The author argues that instead of constantly integrating various SaaS services, it's better to choose an integrated platform (like Cloudflare or Supabase) to avoid repetitive costs and hassles, thereby improving development efficiency.