The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc.
If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Free tools have a predictable and stable cost.
I have probably been burned more times from free tools over the years, but the scars aren’t as deep. It’s just a shrug and hoping the other project works when the first doesn’t.
Unless they suddenly turn from free into a $21/month per person fee.
- Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't really want to do it without some sort of review. In this case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit.
- With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more about the agreement, risk, required disclosures (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors.
- On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else to buy too, and it multiplies quickly.
Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for it. But there are considerations here also around stuff coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support - obligating their time with your purchase is something you need to agree on or avoid.
EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase orders is easy without any oversight.
Docker Desktop was free, now it's $21/month, what will it cost next year when Docker needs more money?
Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let’s roll our own!
Heroku meets our needs 100% let’s spend millions to switch to K8 and have a much worse experience.
A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the problem of many business units. I spent a week building a crappy version of codecov for our few repos.
Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.