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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Okay but how much does that really say? All HN/startup advice says that when you sell to enterprises you have to charge enterprise prices. Meanwhile techies are notoriously for preferring to spend a month's worth of salary building an FTP server to replace Dropbox with.

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Hashicorp's prices are not what i'd consider to be 'enterprise prices'. When we looked at buying "enterprise vault" a few years ago it was six figures a year for a relatively small install. It was basically "we don't want your business" pricing.

> six figures a year

So, they cost about 1 developer?

I mean, yes, it is a bit expensive. On the other hand, it also shows that it is nearly impossible to have an opensource product and be profitable at the same time, especially with dev/infra tooling like this.

> > six figures a year

> So, they cost about 1 developer?

Where lol. You live in a bubble.

> Where lol.

Not in the US, for that matter.

Where is it? UK? Ireland?

There are countries where English is not the main language, and these countries do in fact have software developers.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Captain Obvious. I’m asking WHERE is the country where a single dev costs $1m per year.

Six figures a year is from 100k to 999k.

1M is seven figures.

Counting is hard.

Indeed, thanks.

> All HN/startup advice says that when you sell to enterprises you have to charge enterprise prices.

HN/founder culture is a bubble though.

And the original statement was Joel's and said you have to either charge something that the lowest level manager can approve on their own OR enterprise pricing. Basically you can charge $30 or $3000 but not $300.

I remember seeing quotes for Hashicorp Vault Enterprise, the price for Vault dwarfed the entire cloud bill of the company. And yet the cloud bill (through the marketplace) included other third-parties that were being paid an "enterprise price".

I can tell you that I worked at a large company that was moving pieces like identity and secrets management to SaaS or open source solutions years after rolling their own and failing to keep up. I'm well versed in built vs buy vs opensource.

For the record, Hashicorp vault was 10x the cost of our fully managed Identity system for a million+ unique logins a month.

Was there still people buying Vault at that price? From my perspective it looks like Hashicorp has been overplaying its hand there, but maybe it worked somehow!?

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