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Comment by jshaqaw | Hacker News Reader

Sales and marketing costs at 60% of revenues last year? My understanding of Palantir is that this isn't some SaaS model where a fixed cost product can be scaled at huge gross margins. This is a niche IT consultancy coming up on two decades of life. Today's stock market of hype dream valuations is their window to offload this to the public and clearly they know it.

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While it's been years since I was in a location with the tech deployed, it was 100% a consulting first gig. Nothing was done without an Palantir Engineer. The sad thing is the extra expenses not accounted for in the contracts too. For example, the clearances / costs were often covered by host agencies (at an extremely steep price) for the analysts, something usually passed on to the vendor to cover. So in a sense, they paid for software, paid for an employee, and paid all the associated fees to clear / maintain the employee. I don't think this flys in the private sector at all and it shows with their limited client base.

All clearances are paid for by the government, they are never billed to the vendor. If they charged the contractors then small businesses would never be able to compete. Hell, medium businesses wouldn't be able to compete.

There is an estimated cost of said clearances, as needed so the government can try to budget accordingly, but it is not handed down to vendors.

I'm not sure I agree. Usually the Prime has negotiated it as part of their fee package, but there is most certainly fees for applying and granting clearances for third parties. There's even more fees for establishing a proper SSO and certifying as well. We had a default 50k cost barrier for any new TS/SCI candidates we put forth. Sometimes this was reimbursed, but it was most definitely a good faith cost we incurred.

it would blow my mind if you tell me you know a company that has written a literal check for a security clearance in the last twenty years.

i suspect that cost barrier is more the government saying "we aren't paying for it, you need to find someone that is already cleared."

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