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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, those numbers seem very suspicious. Cherry-picked maybe.

Fifty dollars a month is a decently pricey subscription (like a lot more than Slack, JIRA, Lucidchart, Office, etc.), and you have twenty of those for every employee?

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I've used specialized embedded system tools that cost $10,000/year per seat for tooling. Our QNX licenses were about $5,000 or $10,000/year alone. That's just to be able to run a piece of software. Autodesk tooling is $20 to 30k a year. Some of the more specialized tools cost six-figures.

So I guess if you're just doing some basic web development those numbers are suspect. But if you do hardware or embedded software projects $20,000/year per person is cheap.

For such products, there's the per seat license and the per device license. Depending on volume and vendor pricing model more of the cost will either be in the seat or device license. The value of these the seat license is so that you can distribute their software on your devices versus the value of the seat license of Adobe CC is so that you can use the software directly.

I agree, but how much employees at an enterprise have the software?

Like 5%.

Maybe 1% of enterprises do hardware or embedded development.

You can pick a industrial vertical and find analogues though. Aerospace, automative, chemical, materials, biosciences. And even within a company each departments like finance, marketing, supply chain, etc have their own specialized software. Inventory management isn't cheap. Marketing software like marketo isn't cheap. ERP systems for the finance department aren't cheap. Accounting and tax software isn't cheap.

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