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Comment by benchaney | Hacker News Reader

> If a "crappy" tool costs $10k/mo for the team and doesn't require much or any devops time to setup and maintain, it's likely cheaper than the $0/mo opensource but requires part or full time management option.

This is a total fantasy. There is no reason to expect the crappy enterprise tool that costs money will save time relative to the open source tool. In my experience enterprise tools takes more time and average and cost money. This line of reasoning (frequently pushed by dishonest sales people) is seductive because it tricks you into ignore the time cost of dealing with enterprise, not because it is correct.

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I think you must be in some terrible giant corporate entity where everything sucks all the time.

I bet you that what I told you about this cost/benefit is being done in every startup that YCombinator funds. I bet you they are all choosing product over staff, because their engineering staff is already their ~largest expense. Their engineers might even cost more than the rest of the company combined including executives.

How many companies are choosing SaaS/PaaS/alltheS so their lean team of engineers can scale to millions, instead of hiring a whole team to manage AWS and docker or whatever ops strategy they have.

You might think it's a total fantasy and in the places you work it may be, but I've been in countless meetings with countless executives where the Google Sheet is busted out featuring engineering cost and tool cost and where cost/benefit is aggressively decided.

Spoiler: it's almost always cheaper to use the tool

> I've been in countless meetings with countless executives where the Google Sheet is busted out featuring engineering cost and tool cost and where cost/benefit is aggressively decided.

That is the problem though. It isn't the engineering cost vs the tool cost. It is the engineering cost vs the tool cost PLUS the engineering cost of dealing with the tool once you buy it. Everything you have said so far leads me to believe you are missing this aspect of the cost of buying the tool.

You are right that there is a time and a place for buying over DIY, but in order to make those decisions reliably you need to know how much effort is going to go into dealing with the tool once you buy it. This isn't something you can figure out using Google sheets, because you have to actually evaluate the tool and get a sense of how dangerous the foot guns are.

You're probably right about scaling though. That sounds like an area where the ROI of paying someone else to do it is pretty good.

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