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Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

I was following them on and off as they started around the same time I started a company in similar space and we shared an investor. Similarly, Armory.io also got sold in what seems a fire sale ($7M after raising $200M).

Goes to show how hard this space is.

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Companies dont want to pay for specialized building blocks. Similarly we've been looking at Coralogix recently but needed synthetics. We were offered some sort of package with ur company but decided to go with Datadog instead.

All good. Just wanted to mention this was with a company I started before my current to which you are referencing.

There’s no money in DevTools. Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

It seems like you need to be doing at least part services play - product alone doesn’t cut it

A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either.

Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's products... makes me think perpetually about how to fix this broken market by offering a way to pay for good tools and products without either proprietary lock-in or eternal rent (and centralization and all that entails). It's a very hard problem, and it's not really a technology problem. More of a biz/legal/economic problem.

They’re cheap until the management realizes they just spent a year (so like $300k) educating their devops how cni works and they bounced to faang or some other startup so the project needs to be scrapped or restaffed again and started over. That’s where the services come in. Also yeah it’s well known ICs view saas as direct threat so everyone tries to skip them and go directly to KDM. That’s the reason nearly all enterprise software is pain to use

I think the comment you're replying to meant to say developers are cheap in the sense they allergic to spending money, not that their time/salary is cheap.

Example: "John is a cheap bastard. He never spends any money or buys the cheapest options".

Oh right, yes i misread that. Not like they have any budget anyway

Yes that's what I meant.

I think the aversion to lock-in or recurring expense is stronger than merely an unwillingness to spend money.

I am wondering why does the cloud gets a pass then? It’s all three - the lock in, recurring and also ridiculously expensive

It's not just the money, it's all the things around using corporate money. Procurement is its own level of hell. Dealing with (or even having to think about) vendors' sales critters is a drain on brain cycles. The frustration of "call us" pricing structures.

Or if you want to combine all of the above: perfectly functional but artificially gated features.

If you could pay for a service that GUARANTEES the vendor does not allow their sales people anywhere near your details, that might change things.

Honestly, I think any software business model where you're not paying an explicit monthly/yearly sum is more deceitful for B2B.

No business wants to use a software product that is not being actively maintained, so even if you get sold a perpetual license to "own" a version of the product, you will keep going back to the same vendor to get new versions. So, you are actually still paying a periodic fee, just maybe with capex instead of opex. And if the vendor goes out of business, you'll have to start moving to a new product, so you didn't really "own" the software any more than if you had been paying an explicit rent on it.

Now, SaaS where you are sending all your data to the company's servers is probably one step too far, for various other reasons. But perpetual licenses are generally a bigger scam than periodic ones for business software.

Something that requires you changing your whole dev process around it and then shuts down one day is not an asset.

Atlassian’s market cap is $55 billion. GitLab’s market cap is $11 billion. GitHub sold for $7.5 billion in 2018. There’s money, you just have to be more than a point solution.

Wow, didn't know that about Gitlab. Here's a source[0] for that claim in case anyone else wanted to know. Seems a bit high imo but what do I know?

[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/gtlb

More info here:

https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2021-10-13-gitlab-an...

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/

GitLab's not too surprising, they're a very valued player in the open-source space.

Yes, Gitlab is way evaluation is way overpriced. They're not even in the green yet.

I find my sibling comments amusing as a pair. https://i.imgur.com/rUOrKGn.png

Atlassian is way more than dev tooling at this point and GitHub's user count is insane.

> There’s no money in DevTools.

MongoDB, Snyk and Auth0 might beg to differ. (I work for an Auth0 competitor.)

> Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

Isn't that true of any tool? How are devtools different (from a business perspective)?

The services you're describing (Databases, Security, Auth) have become commodities. This means cut throat competition. Most new players will not have enough to differentiate them from existing offerings

There's lots of money in commodities, though.

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