Landon makes a good point…there are quite a variety of vendors
supplying various SaaS utilities and components (including us!). From
dealing with a number of ISVs, I’ve found that they don’t really want
to assemble the components, select a hosting provider, manage the
hosting and other aspects of the deployment, etc…they just want
somebody to take care of it for them so they can concentrate on
building a competitive feature set in their software that their
end-users will value. The big word in the SaaS business right now is
“monetize”…i.e. the ISVs are asking “how are you going to help me
make money from my app?”, rather than “why are you asking me to spend
more money on additional tools, components and services?”. That’s why
in ElastX we make SaaS-enablement, hosting, and everything else free
for the ISV. When a happy and satisfied customer pays to use an
application, we all make money. Until then, we don’t try to make money
off of each other.

If you are writing a web app from scratch, there are a variety of
toolsets to choose from, as Benjamin points out. If I was doing it, I
might be tempted to go the route of a Force.com, as it provides you
with not only the tools for multi-tenancy and the other “SaaS stuff”,
but it gives you access to an existing marketplace to offer it on. The
drawbacks, though, are a) you have to develop the app from scratch (no
automated transformation of existing Windows apps), b) your app will be
SaaS-only (wouldn’t it be nice to have a SaaS version and a on-premise
version based on the same code stream?), and c) you are locked-in to
that one marketplace.

I guess my final comment is that the subscription model is deeply
flawed. I think it’s the wrong revenue model for most microISV
applications…too many purchase decisions for the consumer to make,
too many payment transactions to process, etc. I think the subscription
model became popular because enterprise ISVs were terrified to abandon
their perpetual license fee revenue for a true pay-as-you-go model. If
they could get the customer to commit to a 6- or 12-month subscription,
the revenue-shock wasn’t as bad. Most microISVs aren’t as addicted to
the big end-of-quarter site license deals, and I think they will
experience a significant revenue increase from the pay-as-you-go model.
Plus, I believe they could reconsider their fees for perpetual
licenses…I think that in trying to capture the market of occasional
users they have priced their perpetual versions too low.

The SaaS Rails Kit makes it easy for people writing SaaS apps with
Rails to get subscription management, billing, etc. out of the box. It
was based on the work I did for my own mISV project, Catch the Best (http://catchthebest.com/), and various client projects.

The SaaS platform/subscription model you are suggesting seems
fantastic. I know that there are a few companies already in the SaaS
billing mediate/subscription space, for example eVapt. I was curious
how your services differ from eVapt’s and other SaaS subscription
managers.