A group of software developers has launched the OccupySaaS project, an effort to build open-source, API-compatible replacements for widely used paid subscription services, starting with Auth0 and Salesforce, and using AI coding tools to do much of the heavy lifting. Tom’s Hardware reported on the effort on November 4, describing it as the latest user-led revolt against the software subscription model, following the buzz around the Adobe-replacement tool ArtCraft.
The premise is simple and, for the people paying the invoices, familiar: subscription exhaustion. Tom’s Hardware writer Bruno Ferreira framed the mood as users “tired of subscription models, price hikes, and drops in software quality” who are now more than happy to rebel.
ZeroAuthy and SalesCompel Are First Out of the Gate
Two initiatives are already underway. One, called ZeroAuthy, targets the identity and authentication service Auth0. The other, SalesCompel, aims at Salesforce. Judging from the project website, Tom’s Hardware reported, the goal is for the new software to act as an API-compatible drop-in replacement where applicable, so existing integrations can be pointed at a self-hosted instance rather than rewritten.
The target list does not stop there. According to the report, OccupySaaS also intends to find replacements for services covering document-and-wiki management, issue tracking, software feature flagging, software and server observability, and customer support. Tom’s Hardware offered its own guesses for the specific products in each of those categories — Confluence, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Datadog and Zendesk — while noting those are guesses rather than names published by the project.
The OccupySaaS Project Sets Hard Clean-Room Rules
Cloning hosted software is legally delicate, and the project has published requirements that read like a compliance checklist. All work must be a fully clean-room reimplementation. No decompiled code is permitted. No confidential information, including source code, may be taken from any previous employers. And there is to be no copying of UI assets or any other trademarks.
Those constraints are less restrictive than they sound, because there is little to decompile in the first place. As Tom’s Hardware pointed out, these services all run on their companies’ servers, so there are no binaries to examine and pull apart. Instead, the reimplementations are built by referencing available documentation, APIs, development kit behaviors and any applicable open standards.
Hosted Software Behaves Like a Black Box
That approach cuts both ways. On one hand, the report notes, the only thing that matters is that user inputs are processed to produce the same outputs as the original software, and those behaviors are largely defined by the published specifications. On the other hand, hosted software is effectively a black box with internal behaviors and “gotchas” that aren’t immediately obvious from the outside.
Tom’s Hardware drew the comparison to console emulators: just as with emulation, any true drop-in replacement needs to reproduce the original’s existing API bugs to be fully compatible. The outlet singled out Jira as an example of an API whose quirks a faithful clone would have to inherit.
Why Go Instead of Rust
The language of choice for the OccupySaaS project is Go, picked over Rust for a practical reason rather than an ideological one. Go allows for easily compiling and linking all dependencies into a single binary that needs no installer and can simply be copied to a target system and executed. According to OccupySaaS, that characteristic makes it ideal for packaging into a Docker container or other forms of self-hosting.
Self-hosting invites the obvious objection, which Tom’s Hardware raised directly: the entire point of renting software as a service is that any snafu with the code or the infrastructure is always Someone Else’s Problem, and running your own instance is a step backwards. The counter is the license. Because the project’s software is Apache 2.0-licensed, there is nothing stopping anyone from standing up a commercial hosted service around it. The report cited Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GitLab and WordPress as existing examples of that model.
Thomas Meadows and a Manifesto About the 99%
The effort appears to be the brainchild of Thomas Meadows, a software engineer with two decades of experience, Tom’s Hardware reported. On his personal homepage, Meadows describes project management as his strong suit — a useful skill for directing AI agents toward a goal.
The project’s website, the outlet wrote, reads like a manifesto. It argues that per-seat licensing taxes growth, and that the same people who built the software are now being laid off. The line Tom’s Hardware pulled from it:
“the software built by the 99% belongs to the 99%.”
A Test of What AI Coding Tools Can Actually Replace
AI-powered software cloning is a hot topic, and software companies are likely unhappy with the notion of vibe coders ganging up to copy their products, as Tom’s Hardware put it. The broader question the OccupySaaS project raises is whether AI assistance has lowered the cost of rebuilding mature commercial services enough to make credible open-source alternatives out of what used to be multi-year engineering programs.
That question lands at a moment when investors are already scrutinizing how much economic value AI tooling delivers, a theme running through the recent volatility in AI-exposed tech stocks and the industry’s heavy spending on AI infrastructure buildouts. For now, the OccupySaaS project is a set of published rules, a language choice, a license and two named initiatives — ZeroAuthy and SalesCompel — rather than a finished product. Whether a clean-room reimplementation assembled largely by AI agents can match the reliability of the services it targets is the part no manifesto can settle.
