I saw some discussion about this elsewhere. Here is how the project describes itself:
OccupySaaS is a protest movement in code: laid-off developers building clean-room, open-source, drop-in replacements for the SaaS giants. First up: ZeroAuthy (Auth0) and SalesCompel (Salesforce).
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street asked who the economy was really working for. In 2026 we’re asking the same question about the cloud. The tools every company runs on are now toll booths — and the people who built them were shown the door.
Two towers occupied.
Identity and CRM: the two subscriptions almost every company pays for and almost nobody loves. ZeroAuthy has shipped its first release candidate, SalesCompel is still early, and both welcome contributors today.
Who’s next?
Every category on this board is a monthly invoice somewhere. The movement picks the next target in public — bring a spec, a use case, or a grudge.
Especially because of scale. “Salesforce” is an incredibly complex group of many software applications with 80,000+ employees and many of their engineers have “unlimited” ai spend. So instead of “we’re rebuilding salesforce” they need to decompose salesforce into its individual elements and see what people need. And even when you have those products decomposed, you need to have swathes of people that understand the business needs that each one fulfills. My title is “Lead Architect: AI” for a medium sized SaaS company and our software has very specialized requirements across a number of verticals. And while salesforce is in no way a direct competitor, I know the sort of things that they’re building and the effort to “vibe code salesforce” is a Herculean task, and all the engineers at my company, many of whom have Ivy League computer science degrees, couldn’t do that in 5 years, if we dropped everything and tried, with unlimited budget for LLM assisted work.
I worry that every level has this misunderstanding, that “Salesforce” is a monolithic system that can be remade if only we pass a comprehensive test suite. Salesforce does not have 80k+ developers making a singular monolithic product. They have 80k+ employees servicing the sales demands of a massive number of customers. Excel is a perfectly fine CRM if you only have a handful of customers.
Hope you’re staying sane in the SaaS landscape. I hear a lot of horror stories.
Yeah absolutely, a ton of their software is bespoke maintained versions specific to one customer and the weird business processes they have. Appreciate the note on the SaaS landscape as well, thankfully I’ve fared much better than some of my friends/coworkers from previous companies who have been caught up in the swathes of layoffs, and I am proud of our team/org for having zero layoffs since the ai bubble started.
I can’t wait for someone to vibecode Lotus Notes, I’m nostalgic for the griping.
Does everything, but all of it wrongly.
Lmao I’m cracking up at the model tweaking trying to write tests on when something fails specifically because lotus notes also fails. “The spec said it had to be exact! A clean room rebuild!”
Even if you somehow do - a lot of people who make the decisions in companies that use sales force won’t be swayed by some open source tool (not to mention it being vibe coded with questionable support). You get them by having a sales team that talks up the product while being charming/inviting them to some event/dinner.
Absolutely true, I didn’t want to even get into the sales side of enterprise software where the decisions made on what a company uses are often made over a round of golf or a night out on the town or something