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Comment by coinbasethrow | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Coinbase until very recently and can confirm this is Coinbase

They paid upfront for 3 years of usage, and yes they were burning > $20m/year on datadog

Dear Lord...the commission on that hog. The sales team eating good.

I was previously in sales and SaaS is considered the pinnacle of industries to be in for sales people. Medical device sales is the only real competitor when it comes to earning potential and my understanding is that's US specific and also comes with atrocious work life balance.

Back in the day I was auditing our support contracts for a place that I worked at. Basically figuring out if we were getting what we were paying for.

My favorite "overpriced support contract" was for an Oracle product. The cost of support was seven figures, and in the entire year a single phone call had been placed to support.

Did that end up being a “support” call where they sold you more services?

The best bit when I worked at one of those companies that had an expensive Oracle contract was this dynamic:

1. Can we use MySQL for <new product>?

No, use Oracle, we have a support contract

2. <oracle related issue occurs> Can we call that support contract in now?

No, let's try the inhouse expertise first.

3. <inhouse expertise comes up with barely passable hack> Can we check if they have any better solutions?

No, it's "solved" now

Like, what were we paying for? I have to assume there's per-engagement costs as well as the ongoing costs, given how hestitant our contract owning team were to let us anywhere near Oracle.

> 3 years

Okay, it seemed like it was 1 year.

So, only insane, not insane^2.

So you’re saying it’s $65 million over three years?

The headline seems misleading, like it’s for a single month.

yes but 20 million dollars a year.

20 fucking million

getting splunk with 1pb a month ingest isnt that expensive.

They'll probably throw in SignalFX for free if you ask them nicely.

Please tell me I am allowed to say "you could just use grep and rsync". I must be allowed!

but only if you have "as-a-service" attached to the end of it.

or something with chatgpt

Headline is slightly misleading

Earnings call said it was an upfront cost

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