take your hourly rate, plus the other person's hourly rate, let's say $100 each, multiplied by 10 minutes spent on emailing back and forth that were avoided, and out pops $33.33.
Calendly is only $12/month for their professional plan which saves you money if you even schedule only one meeting a month with it.
I'm against any and all per-user fees because it's death by a thousand cuts and I refuse to allow that to happen. I will take the time to setup an open-source thing that does the same thing, even if the hourly rate of my setup ends up costing like five years of service JUST BECAUSE I'm that against per-user fees.
But you're not paying for storage costs, you're paying for the salaries of everyone involved with making the product, as well as the hosting costs, and some amount of profit to do with as they please.
Which is fairly pretty central to how capitalism works!
My earlier point is that they have enterprise plans, for those that don't want to pay per-user fees, but, uh, they're enterprise priced.
* This hour rate is absurdly high for huge part of the world. Try $20.
* This argument is used by every SaaS ever. If you want to use everything in that model, you would need 20 of them. At least.
* Slack is $7 a month. Office package starts at $6. Github starts at $4. These are huge tools that make work possible. Small random tool priced at the same level is expensive.
2) Yes? I don't know about 20, but
1 project mgmt: Trello/Monday/Clickup/etc 2 if programming, github/gitlab/etc 3 an Office suite (MS or Google Docs), 4 Email (gmail/office365) 5 comms (Slack) 6 web hosting (squarespace/wix/godaddy/roll-your-own on AWS/GCP/Azure) 7 scheduling cal.com/calendly 8 healthcare 9 payroll (gusto) 10 bookkeeping (pilot.com or quickbooks) 11 401k
Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm genuinely curious to hear what I've missed!
That's besides the point though. Tools do a relatively specific thing. You can't use Slack to pay employees instead of Gusto, Slack doesn't even have a way to transfer money! So you need a tool that does the job that you need done. If it takes 20, it takes 20.
Just because a particular SaaS company uses that argument doesn't mean you have to buy their service. If you can do without it, then don't buy it!
3) Yes but that small random tool does a very specific job. I don't care if hammers are free and screwdrivers are expensive, if I need a screwdriver, I need a screwdriver and I'll pay whatever it costs. (fine, sure there's some point at which point you can reengineer something to use a hammer if a screwdriver's that expensive, but if you're smart enough to make that point you're smart enough to get my point)
Anyway, my real question is what is it about making tools that makes people so cheap? And not just software either, Harbor Freight has been making everything out of Chinesium which is ludicrously cheap, to Craftsman's detriment. If you go and see a movie you really like in a good theater, you're happy you paid for a ticket and ate the overpriced popcorn, when you could have torrented it for free at home and watched it on your phone. There's something about tools that brings out the cheapness in, at least me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it simply because we need so many of them?
https://xkcd.com/2347/ is all too true, but then Dwarf Fortress and they became millionaires overnight! Not that I begrudge them that money, but just that like, human psychology is so interesting!
2) IDE (Jetbrains), knowledge repository (wiki,confluence, notion), on-call management (pager duty, jira SD), error monitoring (sentry) - just a few from the top of my head. AWS pricing and size of the offering is topic on its own.
3) it's not being cheap. At least not only that. Take a look at this summary [1] I stumbled upon recently. According to this calculation tools may account for almost 20% of recurring expenses in Sweden. Sweden is far from being poor. What's more important - you must pay, because otherwise you lose it (hope it never happens to my screwdrivers or popcorn). This is huge liability, that may stop your company from operating. Often really unnecessary.
If you have to view things that way, that summary is bloated. stop paying for slack, use google starter for $6/mo instead of microsoft or google standard, don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
I'm not against paid tools in general. My company pays for many - lots of IntelliJ licenses (at least XXk eur/year), jira server (hard to summarize over the years, but probably at least couple of cars worth) and many others, but we prefer "pay once and own it" model, because we updated when we needed. Sometimes we pushed this for later and spent cash for raises and/or additional people, which were more important than minor software updates. That's why I really dislike subscription model - you don't have this choice - either you pay now or you're out. Don't like new prices? Feel free to migrate for couple of months (while still paying).
> don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...
We actually host ton of stuff on-prem. Isn't nearly as bad as people like to frame it. Of course we have some subscribtions, because it's business not crusade, but in general keeping mandatory recurring costs low, proved to be good strategy.