The day the market asked what your tools are really worth

What we're tracking

• •The economics underneath the software you buy SaaStr published a piece on what it calls the terminal state of software, and the argument is worth understanding before you sign a multi-year contract [1]. For two decades, the reliable business model in B2B software was the slow annuity: modest growth, but revenue that renewed year after year because your data was locked inside the application and could not easily leave. As the piece puts it, "Growth faded, but the annuity was forever" [1].
• •Who pays to keep open source alive GitHub reported that the community has now contributed $100 million to the people who build and maintain open source software [2]. The company framed it as "$100 million contributed by the community to the people who build and sustain open source every day" [2].
• •When your finance tools carry money between them Xero announced a partnership with Revolut Business aimed at helping New Zealand firms trade internationally [3]. The framing is about ambition and reach: "Because our market is relatively small, many Kiwi small businesses have the goal to go global right from the start" [3].
• •Charts that show more than one thing at once Google Sheets added support for combo charts, which let you plot different kinds of series together — for example, bars and a line — on the same visual [4]. Google described it as "enhanced support for combo charts" for "creating multi-series visualizations" [4].
• •What a media buy actually delivers SaaStr also published an unusually direct account of one of its own advertising deals: 5.4 million impressions that drove 11,749 people to a signup form [5]. The piece opens by naming the problem most buyers know and few say aloud — that with a typical media buy, "you sign up, wire the money, the ad 'runs,' and 60 days later you get a PDF with an impressions number and no way to check any of it" [5].
• •The through-line Five announcements, one recurring demand: proof you can inspect. The economics of software reward vendors who make your data hard to move [1]. The tools you rely on stand on foundations that need funding to survive [2]. The value of connecting two systems is that the numbers can no longer disagree [3]. A chart is only as honest as its axes [4]. And a marketing spend is only worth what you can trace to a real result [5].