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Comment by chevman | Hacker News Reader

You guys have some intriguing ideas here.

I've been in this space for 15+ years now, worked with most of the main players that have on-prem and SaaS solutions, and deployed and run solutions at scale at a few of the largest companies in BigCo land for multiple years now.

I would be cautious on focusing too heavily on the 'developer as the customer' here. Most buying decisions in this space are not made by IT, they are made by CMOs, CXOs, CDOs, etc as that is who owns the budget (and results) tied to this type of solution.

At almost any scale, when you look at total cost of ownership, licensing from one of the main solution providers is usually quite a bit cheaper than building out a whole proprietary stack that one then has to maintain in house via their IT org that likely is not an expert at this kind of stuff.

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Thank you, and you raise some great points.

Re-"developer as the customer", the mismatch between who makes the buying decisions for this kind of tech (CMO's etc.), and the devs who do much of the heavy lifting to make it work, is a real challenge.

Also, your point re the economies of scale of self-hosting vs using saas is valid. For small to mid sized orgs, using a cloud offering can be more economical.

However, we've observed that larger orgs often migrate off of saas to use open-source or build software in-house. This occurs for a number of reasons:

- They will have more engineering resources to allocate, in this case to marketing / growth.

- At their scale, the fixed costs of allocating engineers to implementing solutions are often exceeded by the variable costs of saas products, which commonly have volume based pricing.

- They often have more unique requirements that are not served by any particular saas product, and closed source saas is not extensible.

Some recent examples of this:

- Several large orgs are migrating off datadog in favor of open source observability tooling.

- Airbnb recently implemented the equivalent of Dittofeed internally (they responded in this thread).

Still, you raise legitimate concerns, and we're still figuring things out. Would love to get in touch, to better understand your perspective if you have time!

Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but it seems like an overly negative/cautious take?

Personally I can see exactly where this product fits in and provides a valuable alternative to the incumbents, and I’m really happy to see a self-hosted open source solution in this space.

The ability to have total ownership and control of the customer data (when needed) is great.

The balance between a friendly UI and a well thought out developer/integration experience seems especially good to me.

The TCO is going to vary wildly based on the org’s scale and state of development. And yes, skillset. Your reservations might be slightly skewed by your experience in “BigCo” land? :)

I think for Enterprise you should include professional services and consulting in TCO. And usually the Enterprise SaaS tools you mention are a bit cheaper on licenses, but very expensive on the consulting. It makes sense because if a tool is open source and known there is a lot more talent in the job market, if a tool is closed source it takes money just to learn it and people have to recover that investment.

But you are right, I think Dittofeed should sell their benefits to C-Suite execs, not to developers.

What you are saying is true but wonder if that's how it should be?

Marketing (via email, push, ad, whatever channel) should be an extension of their product experience and it can be owned by the product/engineering team. I have seen instances where growth-marketing reports to prod/eng.

Makes sense to have more right-brain activities (brand marketing, ads etc) to not come under engineering but growth marketing is often very analytical.

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