Andrew Wilkinson, co-founder of Tiny and owner of popular platforms like Dribbble, Letterboxd, and AeroPress, sparked a discussion about enterprise software pricing after expressing shock at DocuSign‘s costs. His query about cheaper alternatives prompted a pointed response from Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu about bloated SaaS companies.
“I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What’s the best alternative? Is there something free or stupid cheap?” Wilkinson posted on Twitter.
Vembu, who positions his company’s Zoho Sign as a competitor to DocuSign, didn’t hold back in his criticism of the digital signature giant. “DocuSign is a supremely bloated company that sells super over-priced enterprise software,” he stated, adding that Zoho doesn’t need “6705 employees to produce digital signature software.”
The Zoho founder suggested a method for businesses to evaluate their SaaS vendors: “Consider public SaaS players that are your vendors and look at their sales and marketing expense vs their R&D expense. If they are spending a lot more selling the software to you than building it in the first place, that is a very good signal you can save a ton of money replacing them.”
When questioned about whether sales and marketing expenses could serve as a competitive moat for mature software products, Vembu dismissed the notion. “Sales and marketing as a moat assumes that enterprises will forever pay to be sold to or forever pay a huge ‘brand premium’. I personally would not bet on it,” he responded, pointing to how open-source solutions have successfully penetrated enterprise markets in critical areas like data center servers and databases.