I'm glad to see the first thing you mentioned was the value of purchasing software.

For some reason software developers are particularly averse to paying for software, even when it pays for itself.

My current company spent over $10k + at least a month of developer salary building an OKR app for the company, so probably in total $25k. One look at the SaaS landscape there would have revealed plenty of $5/mo/seat solutions that would take DECADES to break even with the investment we already made. To add insult to injury, the app was vibe-coded and barely works.

In my experience, software that wants to help you is cheap. Software that wants to _trap_ you (Salesforce, Oracle, the Cloud) is expensive, and any software you write yourself falls into the latter category by default (you own it, you maintain it).