Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My team is responsible for the research, evaluation, approval, integration, and on-going support for each and every single platform that is within our stack. We have a lengthy standardized process for evaluation/scoring/approval and one of our mandates is a minimum of 30 days, no payment, and no Sharewaresque limitation in functionality. If we cannot get 30 days, it's a simple 'no,' and we move on to the next.

Even at 30 days, it's extremely stressful on the team to get the system up and running, ingest our test case data, and run our tests. This is after going through this process >100 times. There's simply no way to get everything that needs to be done with an evaluation of even basic coverage in less than 30. Full stop.

Lack of adequate understanding of the potential challenges an org is going to face during implementation and use is, IMO, the single biggest reason implementations run WAY OVER budget, time, and eventually fail at integration w/the rest of the org. This is entirely ignoring the required change management, which is another beast entirely.

It sounds like you're bragging about a dysfunctional way of working. If what your team is doing is valuable they should get any tools they like without much questions. Just like in any reasonable workplace. Because workers produce more and better when they have better tools.

You can also just buy the software to evaluate it. This way you have unlimited time to see if it fits or not. That's what people do in other industries.

Yeah it is a bit odd to say that the #1 requirement is that the software be free for 30 days, that would disqualify a bunch of critical infrastructure.

A lot of multiple thousand dollars per seat software will offer evaluation licenses, for various lengths of time, sometimes way longer than 30 days.

Theres a quick fall-off.

Sourcegraph is $99/u/m and has major network effects. For a moderately sized org this is quickly an entire developer salary.

Snyk is similarly priced, unfortunately “just buy” is a really easy way to:

a) pay more than something is woth

b) have multiple products doing the same thing. (for example, I have Miro and figjam and Mural in my company because each do something slightly better and teams have chosen the tools that work best).

That means we often double pay on licenses for ostensibly similar software.

Sourcegraph CEO here. It’s not $99/user/month anymore. It’s great that a lot of companies were willing to pay that, but we and our customers prefer a lower per-user price and a higher % of devs at the company using it (ideally 100%). We reduced prices for our customers (current and future). You can see the posted pricing at https://sourcegraph.com/pricing.

For any other dev tools companies, I’d strongly recommend having lower prices so that every dev at your customer can use it (if that’s relevant for your product). If you start seeing customers be really picky with who gets a license, it’s probably priced too high.

Off-topic, but I see you always responding very quickly whenever Sourcegraph is mentioned.

I was entertained a while back when I saw you getting accused for using sockpuppets, but am I correct in thinking that you're probably just using the API to monitor for name mentions?

Edit: To be clear, I think this is great and that more companies should do this.

Syften & Common Room =)

Haha, yeah, @jdorfman's sibling comment mentions the tools we use. Any mentions on HN, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, etc., show up in our team chat. The gold standard, of course, is Sid at GitLab ("GitLab CEO here" :).

Why does it say 1 user limit for Pro plan and also that is for small teams? Or am I missing misunderstand the pricing page?

Teams (that don't need Cody Enterprise) should just buy Cody Pro for each dev individually for now. We will have shared billing soon.

A) You don't need to buy the software for every employee at once. Why not buy it for a dozen and try it? If it's good you get more licenses.

B) You can buy software and evaluate and decide not to use it and cancel the license.

Well, maybe a way to let workers try out better tools and not explode the budget /complexity of the tech stack is to give devs $500 / year to spend on whatever they want. It could be monitors, a new IDE, etc.... This way individuals can try out a new tool and if they really see itts value they could "sell" it to management.

Even where there hasn't been a formal policy I usually haven't had a hard time getting anything that costs, say, $50.

$500 per year is a pathetically low amount for a dev who is expected to make his company hundreds of thousands or millions per year. Plumbers and HVAC specialists have tools worth tens of thousands of dollars.

We already have equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's between our ears.

Your glasses?

Comparing subscriptions to one-off costs makes little sense.

> Plumbers and HVAC specialists have tools worth tens of thousands of dollars.

And how many of their tools are annual subscriptions? And do their tools have residual value e.g. sell the business as a whole?

Who said it was about subscriptions?

But physical tools wear out when used professionally, so they are an ongoing cost. Not to mention all other material that are simply spent when used by people in physical businesses.

This sounds very much like an "enterprise" sale, with a sales rep who can help with checklists and presumably extend your trial quite a bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com