Many people on HN make the jump from "I would not buy that" to "There is not a market for that", but there is, in fact, a market for SaaSifying lots of things.

It's no value judgement if you want to continue using Excel for privacy, compliance, or security reasons. You do you. But SaaS companies get very good at developing privacy, compliance, and security stories, particularly as they move into enterprise. (Below enterprise it's less of a big deal, partially because customers care about them less and partially because small businesses are, as a judgement-free statement of engineering reality, abominably bad at data security.)

Yes - I agree, the point is that most of the time an Excel "app" is solving a very specific problem using data coming from some other (internally managed, usually legacy) system. Like: I run a report, transform the result in .csv with some ultraedit macro, slurp it up in Excel and off I go.

(off I go can often being something like: upload the result to the same or a different legacy system, again in some custom format).

Maybe I can pester my own IT dept. to add an extra option to the report so that it spouts off a .csv directly. That's all, the rest still lives in Excel.

Then I am free to play with data as much as I like (take also in account that in some cases you want these in a Excel just to be able to manipulate them better, while the old app works record by record, you can make changes across a thousand records using the Excel interface... and keep also in mind that this is maybe something you need to do once or twice a year, when you renew your catalog prices or whatever).

Now, what is the cost of:

- going out on the market looking for a SAAS that can get my data exactly in the format I use internally, applies the required transformations and send the result back in a format I can use

- assess that the SAAS vendor is indeed trustable for my desired level of security, SOX compliance, etc.

- add one more vendor to my portfolio of vendors/licenses/purchasing orders

So the reason not to go to SAAS is actually a combination of security/external resource dependency/cost/bureacracy.

Where "cost" is mostly inertia+sunk cost fallacy. I am sure that a SAAS may cost less than the hours spent manually doing all the stuff I mentioned above (including mantaining the Excel spreadsheet) but the latter is a "hidden cost" because it something that happens infrequently and is part of the normal chores of whoever is using the Excel sheet itself.

While introducing a new SAAS app will be an IT cost (to identify/approve it, add a recurring subscription etc.)