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Comment by SteveGerencser | Hacker News Reader

So very much this. I went through 4 30 minutes meetings with a vendor for a client of mine before I had enough with them and told them either give me a price or I'm forever done with them. 4 meetings just to get a price! Then they threw a price at us and we understood why they needed so many meetings. We ended up building the software we needed in house for 25% of what it would have cost to license theirs. And that includes creating an IT department that had not existed at that company before.

Over a month wasted on pointless meetings just because they were afraid to share their price.

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> 4 meetings just to get a price!

This is often a sign the vendor doesn't know how to price their product. It sounds to me like they didn't have any index of where the lines really were - one line is price where the customer building it themselves ins the option. The other is the price too low we can't do the deal line. They were probably afraid to talk price because they were afraid to put the first number on the table.

> We ended up building the software we needed in house for 25% of what it would have cost to license theirs.

Not surprising. I've been in way too many of these kinds of meetings, both buying and selling. Now when I buy, I flat-out tell the sales rep:

"We make software. One of your competitors is us building what you have. Give us a price that makes that option unattractive."

Do you put your A team on internal software? Are the support, documentation, and maintenance stories the same as they are for revenue software? Etc.

Not that this can’t be done and done well, but just like running your own datacenter the idea looks much more attractive at the beginning than it does a year or three in.

Had a previous prospect with a large, well known software company that paid several times more per engineer than our own and somehow in the end they thought they could build and maintain the software for less than what we were charging (we didn’t even break into 7 figures annually at all). In the end they formed a team internally that was several times larger than ours when technically we met their stated capacity needs and for the foreseeable future. Last I heard 4 years later they were still building and operational using the same thing as what the vendor (my company) offered. Some companies really would rather pay many times more and take the hit financially because a culture of NIH is so prevalent and deep across the company that it’s considered a risk if the vendor can’t be pressured to be acquired.

I don't want to minimise your experience, and clearly the vendor was not a good fit for you.

But the software didn't cost 25% because that's not how software works. Basically you now have a choice, A) the project is done, so you can fire that new IT department. B) the project is not done, so they can keep working (meaning your 25% will keep growing) C) the project is done, but you keep the team for future development, so you give them other projects to do in the meantime.

And you just hope that you keep the team interested enough to stay around, so that in 5 years time when you have to make it work with TLS 1.4,or Windows 12,or the new Dropbox API, or whatever that there's still someone around to do it.

My point is that writing software is never done because it exists in a world that changes. And keeping programmers on salary to do that is expensive.

That said, yes, it can clearly still end up being cheaper than some Enterprise offerings I've seen.

I’d love to hear more about this. Can you blog about it?

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