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The company is paying like $150k/mo in salaries (conservative ballpark based on 20 employees). $1k/mo at that point is a rounding error, and if in total that spend actually does move the needle on productivity in any significant way, its easily worth it.

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The parent comment is viewing productivity as dynamic and time varying.

i.e. Productivity may increase in the short term, but may decrease in the long term due to some tooling shortfall.

Whether or not that matters is dependent on a company’s goals and funding strategy.

I find large orgs tend to build inhouse tools as they get bigger. But you're never going to get big if you start optimizing for late stage scaling needs before you've even found your market footing.

I worked with a bunch of early stage startups, they don't need to build a lot of features like marketable products. Lots of scripts and poor ui will do just fine with manageable maintenance (devs even like their poor invention .. hope they would opensource it)

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