With my VP Eng hat on, PagerDuty is a useful service
With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing
Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere
With my VP Operations hat on, I can't justify the pricing
Wearing both hats at the same time, I built the solution my company needed inside a weekend and allocated funds elsewhere
The problem usually is, when the rest of your systems are down then this one is likely to be down as well, making it useless. People are paying PagerDuty primarily for their uptime and reliability.
There are less expensive alternatives to PagerDuty that might have fit your budget, and wouldn't have put your engineering team on the hook for managing this custom built service forever.
I see this sentiment often, however it's one of the best ways to get profitable business ideas. I start making something, and if in the course of doing so, I find a problem that I can solve (which is not related to the primary product), I turn around and start selling my undifferentiated work as its own product.
And in a volatile macro, you may be loathe to drop talent you'll need again, so might as well have them roll something and maintain it versus outside spend. You can always migrate back to a SaaS vendor when the coffers/pipeline is more robust.
"We pay for the services we use so that if they break, the Managing Director can pick up the phone, yell at someone and something will happen. That doesn't work with Open Source."
If you pay for a support contract, you too can yell at someone to get something to happen. It's not related to open source but to whether you're paying money for the service.
I get that they must work very hard on building that perception because it's easily shattered, but still. It's hard to ignore how reliable it has been.
- PagerDuty is great when my budget is big and I need something ASAP - Buy vs Build.
- Home grown alternative is great when the word from Finance is the cost savings to build is now more important than the time it takes.