Ask HN: Those who run dev shops – what products do you pay for?
Those who are running/part-of development shops which build web/mobile products - what products do you pay for ?
- Basecamp, CRM + marketing automation, email services, SEO (moz), google business services, twilio (phone/sms) and AWS were all common.
I'd also pay for plug-ins and stuff when it made more sense then building stuff. But those are kinda the base level things I always had available. SEO tooling was really critical when doing web dev work for people, that way I could show proof of results from before and after.
Part of the key for me was to make sure I looked like a firm even when I was just one person but wanting to grow. So I always kept a professional website, business email addresses, phone numbers etc. I would never lie if someone asked me a direct question about how many people worked at the company, but if they said how big are you guys, I'd usually give number of projects done in the past 3 months or 12 months etc. And I'd include all the little projects even if I did them as favors or as pre-sales activity to gain a larger deal. As long as I was doing it professionally and to further the business it counted IMO.
Pyramid schemes are primarily focused on value flowing upwards, whereas in your example the value is flowing downwards and outwards.
Every industry has and always will have "snake oil" sellers, but the meaningful companies in 99% of the case produce real value to their customers.
There are times where we opt for google sheets rather than pay for a service but we never build anything ourselves if there is something we can buy / rent out there.
I work at a consulting company and we had a company needing some monitoring setup. Ended up going with Grafana and some AWS resources over Datadog. The cost difference was huge. Datadog would have been around $20k/mo. The grafana and AWS solution was about a tenth of the cost.
What are you using Datadog in a custom dev shop for, and how do you justify the cost?
My impression was Datadog is for very large and very profitable companies.