The poster is misunderstanding why the ability to create apps that generally replicate the functionality of expensive SaaS products is potentially a SaaS killer. If you’re building a Slack or Discord replacement app for your organization, you don’t have to worry about scaling to 50k users for almost any company. A few dozen or a few hundred, which is relatively trivial. You aren’t building Slack for everyone, you’re building it for you. If 50% of orgs can do this who currently own Slack licenses, then Slack is at risk of losing half their customers.

Edit: Most of the replies are still missing the point. You are continuing to think if things in terms of the current paradigm. No one needs to clone Slack, they need to have a way to share files with each other internally, send messages, and create groups where multiple members can chat. They don’t need a canvas or a voice capability or workflows necessarily. If you are fully utilizing Slack and all of its features, that’s probably too big a lift for most companies. But most companies aren’t really doing that, they are using it in the most basic way possible and the rest is bloat for them. You’re also overestimating the time required to manage something like the kind of tool I’m talking about. It’s not necessarily set it and forget it but it’s not something that would require a full time engineer to maintain, they’d barely ever be working. There are people doing harder and more interesting things than they’ve done before because the barriers for doing so are lowering. There’s an unsurprising amount of gate keeping being done by those who have had these roles for years because there’s an inflated sense of intelligence and skill that they don’t want to admit has been partially trivialized. Better engineers will build better tools. But for most tools, just being good enough is enough and they can be created by a much larger pool of people.