Laid-Off Engineers Launch OccupySaaS to Clone Auth0, Salesforce
Original: OccupySaaS
Why This Matters
Open-source SaaS alternatives gaining traction could pressure per-seat pricing models industry-wide.
OccupySaaS, launched October 2026, is an open-source protest movement where laid-off engineers use AI to build clean-room, self-hostable replacements for Auth0 and Salesforce under Apache-2.0, with no per-seat pricing.
OccupySaaS bills itself as 'a protest movement written in code.' The project targets what it calls the SaaS toll-booth model—per-seat pricing, proprietary lock-in, and the irony that engineers who built these platforms were laid off while the products kept growing.
The method is strict: no leaked code, no decompiled binaries, no confidential material from former employers. Spec writers and builders are kept separated by a formal firewall, with each repo carrying a CLEAN_ROOM.md policy. AI agents build from public API docs, open standards (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, REST), and published SDK behavior alone—then compatibility is verified against vendors' own public client SDKs.
Two projects are live. ZeroAuthy is a self-hostable identity server written in Go that replicates the Auth0 Authentication API. It supports OIDC discovery, JWKS, multi-tenant domains, authorization code + PKCE, rotating refresh tokens, and has been verified against auth0-spa-js, auth0-react, and nextjs-auth0. Sales Compel targets Salesforce, built on a Go/PostgreSQL core with a Vue record editor. Both are Apache-2.0, self-hostable, and carry no telemetry or seat counters. The project claims a community of one million and is coordinating via Discord and GitHub.