There is something I have been thinking about lately.
Why do we depend so much on online services for things that, in many cases, are not really services at all?
Take Google Docs or Google Sheets. Or Todoist, Notion, Canva, Airtable, and many other tools we use every day. They are convenient, polished, and easy to use. There is nothing wrong with them.
But at some point, we seem to have accepted a strange idea: that if we want to use a piece of software, we also have to rent the software from the company that made it.
And I am not sure that this should be the default.
What are we actually paying for?
There is an important difference between software and infrastructure.
If I want to run a website, I understand that I need a server. Someone has to provide CPU, memory, storage, networking, backups, electricity, and all the infrastructure required to keep that server running.
That is infrastructure.
But if I want a simple task manager, a spreadsheet, a form builder, an image editor, or a document editor, why does that necessarily have to be a service operated by somebody else?
The software itself can often run on hardware that I control.
That hardware can be sitting on my desk.
It can be a small home server.
Or it can be a virtual machine in a cloud provider.
It does not really matter.
The important part is that the software belongs to me and runs on infrastructure that I control.
The cloud does not have to mean someone else’s software.
It can simply mean someone else’s hardware that I rent.
The subscription model changed how we think about software
The SaaS model has been incredibly successful because it solves many real problems.
You do not have to install anything. You do not have to maintain servers. You get automatic updates. You can access your data from anywhere.
All of that is useful.
But convenience has also changed our expectations.
We have started treating very simple software as something that must permanently exist behind somebody else’s login page.
A task manager becomes a subscription.
A spreadsheet becomes a subscription.
A document editor becomes a subscription.
A form builder becomes a subscription.
An image editor becomes a subscription.
And once you accept that model, you are not only paying for the software. You are also accepting the rules of the company operating it.
Your account can be suspended.
The pricing can change.
Features can move between plans.
The product can be discontinued.
An API can change.
A company can decide that your particular use case is no longer interesting to them.
None of this necessarily makes those companies bad. It is simply the natural consequence of depending on someone else’s service.
What if we separated software from infrastructure again?
Imagine a different model.
You rent a server from whatever provider you like.
You have 2 GB of RAM. Or 8 GB. Or 64 GB.
You have as much storage as you need.
You install an operating system.
And then you install your software.
Not someone else’s SaaS instance.
Your software.
You decide what runs on it.
You decide when it gets updated.
You decide who can access it.
You decide how much hardware it gets.
If you need more CPU, you get more CPU.
If you need more memory, you get more memory.
If you need more storage, you get more storage.
The limitations are mostly the limitations of the machine you are running it on.
This is a very different relationship with software.
You do not need a massive infrastructure company to do this
This is one of the things I find particularly interesting about web technologies.
A surprising amount of software can be built with technologies that browsers already understand.
HTML.
CSS.
JavaScript.
WebGL.
And, when necessary, a small server-side component.
That means an application does not necessarily need to be a massive platform with thousands of servers and a proprietary backend.
It can simply be software.
Software that you download.
Software that you install.
Software that you run.
And this is where projects like OpenStation become interesting.
OpenStation brings a desktop-like environment to WordPress, with windows, a dock and virtual desktops inside the WordPress admin.
But the more interesting idea, at least for me, is what you can put inside that environment.
For example, AllTerrain Photo Editor is a non-destructive, GPU-accelerated image editor built for WordPress and OpenStation. The editor does the actual image processing in the browser using WebGL, while the server mainly stores the result.
There is also AllTerrain Work, an open source task manager for OpenStation, and AllTerrain Forms, for creating forms inside the same environment.
And this is the part I find exciting.
These are not separate SaaS products that require another account, another subscription, another dashboard and another company to sit between you and your software.
They are applications.
You can run them as part of your own environment.
Your cloud server can become your computer
We often talk about “the cloud” as if it were a completely different thing from having a computer.
It is not.
A cloud server is still a computer.
It has a CPU.
It has RAM.
It has storage.
It runs software.
The main difference is that the computer is somewhere else and you rent access to it.
So why should renting a computer automatically mean renting all the software that runs on it?
It doesn’t have to.
You can rent the infrastructure and own the software.
That distinction is surprisingly powerful.
You could have a small virtual server and run your own WordPress installation, OpenStation, and whatever applications you need.
Your server becomes your private software platform.
Not because some company gave you permission to use a particular SaaS product, but because you installed the software yourself.
This is not about replacing every SaaS product
I am not arguing that everybody should stop using Google Docs tomorrow.
There are good reasons to use hosted services.
Collaboration is one of them.
Reliability is another.
Backups, authentication, email delivery, global infrastructure and many other things are genuinely difficult problems.
Sometimes paying somebody else to solve them is absolutely the right decision.
The point is something else.
We should have the choice.
If the problem can be solved by software running on our own hardware, then we should be able to do that.
And “our own hardware” does not necessarily mean buying a server.
It can mean a €5 or €10 monthly virtual machine in the cloud.
The cloud is not the enemy.
The real problem is confusing infrastructure with software.
Maybe the future is not more SaaS
For years, the direction of the web has been clear: move everything online and let someone else run it.
Maybe there is another direction worth exploring.
Move the infrastructure online, but keep control of the software.
Rent the server.
Own the applications.
Choose what runs there.
Upgrade when you want.
Remove what you do not need.
Build your own environment.
That is one of the ideas behind OpenStation that I find particularly compelling.
If web technologies are capable of producing full applications, then a web application does not have to mean a website that belongs to somebody else.
It can simply be software.
And if you have a server, whether it is sitting under your desk or running in a cloud provider, there is no fundamental reason why that software cannot be yours.
That is the distinction I think we have forgotten.
Maybe we do not need to rent software.
Maybe we just need to rent the computer it runs on.