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Comment by iamaelephant | Hacker News Reader

> Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000/year.

Really? You can imagine only #83/mo in software costs for a working professional? I think you're being really rather unimaginative.

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I'm not trying to be super-imaginative, I'm trying to be realistic. That's the point.

Considering Office 365 is $10/mo (before volume discounts) and is probably the main tool most office workers use, I am having a hard time how on earth you get to $10K/12=$833/mo.

I'm supposed to believe the average office worker uses a total of subscription software that is eighty times more expensive than Microsoft Office?

Accounting software, payroll software, financial planning software, supply chain management/inventory, health insurance/401k/benefits/PTO software, JIRA/Ticketing, knowledge management (sharepoint/internal wiki/confluence), data warehouse licenses, reporting software (tableau, looker), IT and device management software, expense and reimbursement, business travel scheduling, performance management, contract management, backups and disaster planning, etc. And then any specialized software for actually doing different jobs roles (CAD, photo/video editing (think of the marketing and design departments of any F1000 company), IDE's for the developers, operations software for running a warehouse or factory, etc.

You've listed a ton of tools, but not every office employee uses those, and I hope that payroll software isn't costing $1000 per employee/year.

To get to those large numbers, you'll need to hand-pick companies that have few non-specialized employees.

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