Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

Most of the answers are going to be products that do extensive lock in as a service. So its easy to replace quickbooks with dozens if not hundreds of old or current accounting software but only quickbooks has the integration with seemingly every financial service out there. Another example is Slack, when people ask for a replacement for Slack they don't mean "IRC in a GUI" but they mean chat with maybe a thousand integrations to every other service and product, so no matter how you configure IRC it'll never had a thousand one click integrations.

The next most popular answer will be defining user friendly and capable as being a bug for bug compatible identical clone with the current industry leader, despite the fact that the industry leader changes their app completely every two years as a moving target yet the users don't care at all, and the industry leader is rarely user friendly because they don't need to be once they have lock in. What they mean is the transfer will be visually seamless to end users and they somehow don't think that writing a clone would have any legal repercussions to the author and writing a clone would be significantly cheaper than just writing something original. So despite "MS Office" being a continuously moving target for 30 years there will never be a FOSS replacement for it, because it would be legal and labor impossible to make an exact bug for bug clone of todays current version and then maintain it tomorrow. Despite the fact that Google Workspace makes end users considerably more productive and its easier to use and easier to learn, its not bug for bug compatible with Excel so its worthless.

The next most popular answer after that will be UpdatesAsAService where last year's product is pretty much worthless today and you're paying for this years product to work. See TurboTax, and as much as no one wants to admit it publicly, almost all security software that only protects you tomorrow, if they even get to it that soon, from yesterday's threats.

None of that office or bug tracking stuff is that interesting or important imho. There's plenty of alternatives that work well enough. The interesting stuff is the hardest. From Google services alone: language translation, voice transcription, maps/directions (open street map is only partway there and Osmand is almost unusable), and of course searching the entire web.

Trello.

Lots of half-baked clones but remarkably few quality foss implementations. WeKan is… a mess. Taiga is complex & the frontend is CoffeeScript (!!). FocalBoard looks about the best of them, but it’s still missing many features and they’ve explicitly rejected calls for OAuth and/ or SAML because they want as a paid feature.

Any SaaS product that uses a rent seeking marketplace to compensate for missing essential product features. Think Atlassian, Shopify, QuickBooks etc.

I was very happy to discover Medusa (https://www.medusajs.com) on HN recently, a pretty solid Shopify alternative.

A fully self-hosted alternative to GMail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Keep and Google Drive (including the office suite apps), just as user-friendly and capable (in antispam, security, synchronization and so on).

Hands down a solution equivalent to Jira. I see so many devops hacking on top of Jira, it would be so much helpful if there was an open source, totally customizable, solution to manage tickets (as complete as Jira).

A FOSS alternative to WolframAlpha's Mathematica. Some great software, such as sagemath, numpy, but I'm not aware of many. Though a key feature they don't have is "single-stepping" over the equation solving process, which WolframAlpha does really well (though still not for all equations). That feature would be above all useful for learning high-school level math.

TurboTax and their ilk.

Tax software is fucking evil and by having a FOSS version of it we could remove a huge lobbyist by driving them out of business which will then simplify tax filing for everyone.

The Ory [0] stuff seems pretty cool. But I have no use for it as of yet.

0: https://ory.sh/

PopSQL

Also, PDF readers on windows are very bad. Acrobat doesn't have dark mode and it feels heavy. Xodo crashes a lot. SumatraPDF is very light weight but lacks a lot of features and lacks dark mode too. If you read a lot at night, this would be very important to you. And I am not talking about the UI only, the PDF itself gets inverted. Xodo does that very well.

Confluence.

I've been looking for alternatives ever since they did the stupid cloud shove, but I haven't found anything coming close enough and robust enough that I can give to everyone, from developers to sales and HR, without having to worry about teaching them another language.

A good small CRM. Odoo exists, but the free tier is too simple and the first paid tier is overkill. There is still room for something in the middle.

I'd love a solid open source version of calendly.

An RMM like NinjaRMM or N-Central, and HUGE points if it written in Ruby On Rails or VueJS. I would dump everything and move to there immediately, start contributing and sponsor. I want to write one myself, but I don't have the time.

A combination of customer support chat (Intercom), customer relationship management / sales (Streak, NetHunt), and customer payments tracking.

So basically, the stack that is needed to handle B2B customers as a startup.

Currently these tools are very isolated, and where integrations exist, they are poor. We have to manage customers in 3 different systems that don't know about each other. When making sales progress on Intercom, it doesn't reflect as conversations in NetHunt.

Open-source would be excellent because Intercom is currently problematic with GDPR and high-security systems that don't like to embed third-party Javascript. The ability to self-host solves that. Most people will still use the hosted service you can offer if reasonably priced.

I hope that https://www.chatwoot.com will do this, but they are currently focused on only the Intercom part.

The services also don't necessarily have to be fully vertically integrated in 1 product as long as they interact well. For example, and add-on to Chatwoot that does the equivalent of Streak/Nethunt, something with good API integration, might also do the trick.

The database part of Notion/a simplified Airtable/Google Sheets storing to plain text files or CSV.

Editing and manipulating CSV by hand is a pain. Something like a simplified sqlite viewer/editor?

TurboTax.

I hate it, but filing in 4 different states plus dealing with a half dozen different brokerage 1099's that need to be wash sale calculated, it's either that or pay someone $500.

Tuple https://tuple.app/

Toggl Time tracker

Ynab

Hubspot & Semrush.

Firebase