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I’ve seen companies burn half a million in developer time to save 10k or less several times.

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.

The 4 hours I spent learning the basics of d3 and then couple hours a night for a few weeks working through examples (of others and of my own design) really gave me a powerful new tool for charting applications. Rolling your own is difficult to justify, but "learn and use d3 (BSD licensed)" seems an entirely reasonable alternative to a high-priced commercial offering.

How much of that is developers doing it because they want to make something new?

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