Say that to my employer who just replaced our in-house developed system with a service and made my job disappear.

And even if they did, the notion that you need proprietary software for that is a lie. There’s nothing wrong with paying a provider to host and admin some AGPL software for you.

Smaller businesses without in-house IT sometimes do, though. Sure they can get an MSP. But if their purpose is to facilitate a software vendor to connect to a server with business specific software they don’t understand, they might as well just get it as a service.

Especially when it’s software that just needs yearly updates due to changing regulations.

I definitely agree that more often than not, the above doesn’t apply, but there specific situations where SaaS actually does make sense and will have a lower cost in money and time.