Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries.

I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs:

Gitlab: 19/m

Docker: 24/m

Slack: 12.5/m

Copilot: 19/m

Office: 12.5/m

Tailscale: 15/m

oslash: 6/mo

pagerduty: 41/m

Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m

Calendly: 16/m

Bonusly: 4.5/m

Snyk: 98/m

Figma: 42/m

Lens: 20/m

Postman: 29/m

Sourcegraph: 99/m

Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m

or:

Jetbrains: All: 78/m

This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group.

That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y

This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period.

So there can easily be overages.

So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce).

That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.

Sorry, but it's a weird list.

You either need these tools to make engineers, sales and other people to provide value and generate revenue, or you don't.

> That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.

Firstly, what's take home salary has anything to do with this? Are Swedish developers paying for these tools out of their pocket? These are business expenses. It's disingenuous to use that number.

Secondly, so what? How much do you think it costs for a pilot to fly a plane? The software they need? The hardware they need? While developer needs a $1,000 MacBook and a few optional double digit monthly expenses to generate insane value.

Again, this list is exactly why I don’t want to sell to developers. Because from business point of view these are such minuscule $20 p/m expenses for the value they provide, especially for one of the most highest paying employees these days. And if you think they don't provide enough value, you just cancel the subscription.

It's the cost of making business. And compared to other industries, we in tech are spoiled and we have it very easy.

> that is a weird list

it is my list, and it is non-exhaustive.

> what's take home salary has anything to do with this?

you are moving the goalposts. You say that devs are overpaid, therefor time saved need only be a few hours to make back the money. I assert that this isn't universally true (that devs are paid well) and that it must apply to all developers (and everyone developer adjacent)

> $1,000 macbook

Nobody is using a $1k computer in the west. Not sure what that is meant to signify either.

> It's the cost of making business.

If you were a hairdresser and you had to pay a new license for every person who touched the chair, then you would have a parable. As it stands we have a lot of per-seat licensing and an SSO tax designed to get the most money from business customers, the result is that a lot of businesses (where dev costs are lower) simply cant (or wont) pay for every little tiny tool- even if it was priced in a reasonable way, because handling the purchasing and buying the license for the seats you need becomes a full time job.

Very often the point is that you have to buy seats for everyone (including non-technical employees) on the same plan if you want to cooperate on these platforms. Very soon it gets expensive. It doesn't make much sense to count the individual license for Jira (but it makes sense for Jetbrains).

Also you're hostage due to vendor lock, and you'll have to pay even if they raised a price or you had a bad quarter.

That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.

Vendor lock-in is a fallacy.

Whether you buy it, borrow it or build it; you’re locked in to the chosen solution.

Homegrown solutions are often harder to escape from than commercial or FOSS solutions.

It’s sometimes easier to escape from one commercial solution to another as companies will provide migration tools and docs as part of their competitive strategy.

You can mitigate solution lock-in through good architecture, but you can never eliminate the cost of change.

You're always locked in, so you need to make sure that you can adapt it as needed. Either because you already own it (homegrown) or because you're prepared to take ownership if needed (FOSS done right).

For commercial software (or FOSS-as-appliance) then you're stuck going along wherever your vendor wants to take you.

FOSS projects change direction all the time as well. Python comes to mind. Solution lock-in is unavoidable. You can only try to contain it.

Of course there's a cost. It's just - in my experience - a lot smaller, when you aren't forced to pay subscription fee along the way.

Example - I was working with jira server for several years at pretty small company. As business grew, there were better and worse moments and sometimes there were more important costs, than another yearly support fee.

Atlassian decided to drop this model and tries to force everyone to the cloud. They say that migration will take 9+ months.

That means if they ever do such change again it will take full annual cost of the license to get rid of them, with no option to avoid it.

What is interesting to me is how much of that can be self-hosted, and how easily. An ops team is expensive, but so is $490/seat-month. Some of the things you mention are really easy to replace — I am thinking Git hosting locally, replacing Slack with Mattermost, Docker with Podman, Buildah & a container repository, Postman with restclient or Jetbrains with emacs — but for several of them there really aren’t good free alternatives.

You are not taking into account that big corps prefer to buy because it is also a way of doing risk management. You can make legally binding agreements with penalty clauses with suppliers. You can't do that with your own employees, which means you have to know how to hire great people and have the opportunity to pay them well, which is non-trivial.

But what are the costs of the alternatives? Not buying anything or rolling a DIY solution? This holds for any employee. Office chair isn't free either.

There are many $1,500 per seat subscriptions that could be purchased by themselves. They usually offer some unique business value and are worth it but when free products exists that are as good or better not using them is lazy. Some services like bonusly should not be per seat.

These are costs that you have determined are worth it. You don't have to pay for Postman if it's $29 a month, but it clearly saves you >$29 a month of productivity. You feel that Bonusly reduces your turnover just enough to be worth $4.5 a month.

Not saying that people couldn't make licenses a bit more friendly. But saying it's expensive to purchase tools you could just not purchase if they weren't worth it doesn't make sense.

I think the main point is that “it’s only 10 dollars s month” is a bad argument. Yes, it can be worth it, but there are gigantic swaths of things that could be worth 10 dollars to purchase and a company is only going to be willing to pay for so many of those. Postman doesn’t just need to be worth 29 dollars a month in productivity, it needs to be worth more than everything else I could convince the organization to spend 29 dollars a month on at this point in time.

Especially in this industry where you’re inevitably in competition with free software as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com