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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

They're spending $30M+ on R&D, so if you feel that way as a customer, that's not good.

On principle alone I wouldn't give them my money ever again. I'd engineer my own lightweight solution before then or use an underdog competitor. I have a sour taste in my mouth for their meteoric rise to success/IPO versus their pathetic investments (or lack therof) in product improvement. It really sucks to use. Reminds me of Engineyard (also abandonware).

I feel that while OP is correct - PagerDuty hasn't changed much - engineering my own on-call system is the last priority of pretty much any business. It's one of the things you don't want to do yourself.

Additionally, PagerDuty works extremely well and I can't think of any additional features we need right now.

Honestly, if your response to critical ops notifications is to engineer a lightweight solution as a part time pet project, I don't want to work for or use your product.

If you are talking instead about hiring an ops engineer to build your custom lightweight solution, I would ask why you're spending 100k+ all-in cost on an engineer to do something you could pay PD to do for cheaper.

We tried using one of their competitors and strongly disliked it, enough to go back to PagerDuty in under a year.

I'm sure there are other options we could have tried, but it seems to do what we need pretty well.

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