OccupySaaS: Developers Use AI to Clone Auth0 and Salesforce

A software engineer with two decades of experience has launched OccupySaaS, an open-source project that uses AI tools to build clean-room replacements for subscription services — starting with Auth0 and Salesforce. The project's first two targets carry working names: ZeroAuthy and SalesCompel.

The brainchild is Thomas Meadows, who describes project management as his strong suit on his personal homepage — a useful skill, he implies, in an era of directing AI agents toward a goal. His site reads like a manifesto. Per-seat licensing taxes growth, it argues, and the people who built the software are now being fired. One line stands out: "the software built by the 99% belongs to the 99%."

Subscription exhaustion is real, and the buzz around ArtCraft, an Adobe replacement, proved users will rally behind alternatives. Now OccupySaaS wants to push that rebellion further.

How do you clone hosted software?

There are no binaries to examine. Services like Auth0 and Salesforce run on their companies' servers, so decompilation isn't even an option. Instead, the reimplementations reference available documentation, APIs, development kit behaviors, and applicable open standards. Judging from the project website, the goal is API-compatible drop-in replacement where feasible.

The project pins its ethics down sharply:

• All work must be fully clean-room reimplementation
• No decompiled code
• No confidential information, including source code taken from previous employers
• No copying of UI assets or trademarks

That constraint cuts both ways. On one hand, only inputs and outputs matter — behaviors largely defined by public specifications. On the other, hosted software is a black box, full of internal behaviors and gotchas that aren't obvious from outside. Just as console emulators must reproduce quirks to run real games, a drop-in replacement must faithfully copy existing API bugs to be fully compatible. The project's own candidate for that lesson: Jira.

What's on the target list?

Beyond authentication and CRM, OccupySaaS intends to find replacements across five more categories: document-and-wiki management, issue tracking, software feature flagging, observability, and customer support. Tom's Hardware hazards guesses at the intended victims in each: Confluence, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Datadog, and Zendesk. That's a broad front for a young project.

Why Go instead of Rust?

The language of choice is Go, picked over Rust for one pragmatic reason: Go compiles and links all dependencies into a single binary that needs no installer. Copy it to a target system. Run it. According to OccupySaaS, that makes the output ideal for Docker containers and other forms of self-hosting.

Critics will object that renting SaaS exists precisely so that code and infrastructure snafus remain Someone Else's Problem, and that running your own instance is backwards. The project has an answer, though. Everything ships under Apache 2.0 licensing, so nothing stops third parties from offering hosted versions — the way Red Hat built a business on enterprise Linux, GitLab sells its namesake platform, and WordPress powers much of the web through commercial hosts.

Whether AI-assisted clean-room development can actually reproduce the edge-case behavior of mature commercial platforms remains unproven. But with per-seat price hikes sharpening developer frustration, and ArtCraft's traction showing appetite for defection, the commercial pressure on incumbents may arrive from directions they can't sue out of existence.