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Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

What do you pay 10 people in a month? Probably somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000? Is the $90 vs $20 really that big of a difference? Especially if it's a good tool that helps your team be slightly more productive.

I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.

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This logic is sound, but any product will be compared price-wise to its competitors if all marketing statements are taken at face value (e.g. they all offer the same benefit of allowing you to manage your projects).

> if all marketing statements are taken at face value

But all marketing statements are rarely taken at face value. With self-service free trials, products can be compared and contrasted.

One tool will work better for a given workflow than others. And it's a no-brainer to pay an additional e.g. $70/m to buy the best tool for the job.

> I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.

The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.

A perhaps more salient example is one we faced last year: do we switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ? Nearly all of the Java developers we asked preferred IntelliJ. That's ok, no problem ... but we're facing switching 300 people from a free IDE to one that costs several hundred dollars, for internal appdev (not a product company, so all of the above hits the SG&A opex spend ... which the street always wants to be minimal). So, 300x$400, the 150X$400 MSDN subscriptions we have for the MS guys, plus ~1500 MS servers, plus about 300 RHEL servers, plus .... The point is, it all add up, and as Patrick (patio11) has noted several times, large companies much prefer bulk, one time POs to subscriptions. Being able to forecast and accrue for both Capex & Opex is extremely important in many large, thin margin companies, especially ones that are not IT-centric.

So, in the end, did you switch to IntelliJ? The suspense is killing me! :)

These costs could still be modest in comparison to the salaries of 300 people.

Your servers are the lion's share of your opex, so buy the licenses. That said, if Eclipse is working for you, I'm surprised the CE edition of Intellij isn't fine, too.

> when the results are the same.

Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.

But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.

Realistically this tool will be very rough around the edges because its new. All new apps are never polished, and this might not even still be around in 6-12 months. There will be feature requests, bugs to work around, other deficiencies (and some efficiencies as well). $9 per user is a lot to ask for something that is unproven when there are competitors that have a track record for less. Im just being honest this are all things that go in when I consider buying software for my team. And reiterating that this would be only one of many tools I have to buy to keep the wheel on the bus.

This is exactly how I feel. From the marketing, it seems to be exactly what my team needs. But I've got a 50 person team and we're all currently limping along using trello. $450/month is a big spend for something unproven. We're currently leaning heavily towards JIRA, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

That logic doesn't make any sense. It's like saying hey, my car costs thirty thousand dollars, why shouldn't I spend $50 on a sandwich?

No, its more like buying premium oil for an expensive car.

True, the sandwich comparison was wrong and yours is good. But GPs question stands: what makes this worth the extra price over its competitors?

Or: what makes premium oil worth the extra money, compared to regular?

Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.

If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.

Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.

engine oil is not the same between brands, and synthetic and regular oil are markedly different.

pm software is not the same between brands either. each one I've used offers a different user experience and each tends to excel in their own way.

software, in general, is also not the same between brands, as you state. yahoo search is different than bing is different from Google.

>Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.

As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.

Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.

The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.

Does that sandwich make your car more 20% more efficient?

Assuming the car was making you money and by buying the sandwich your car could end up making you even more money.

Except, the other sandwich costs 5 dollars, and as far as we can tell, will cause our cars to make the same amount more money as the 50 dollar sandwich, so we need at least some kind of value proposition between the two sandwiches if we are to favor the 50 dollar one. (It's actually quite fun to be reasoning about this at ~2 cuils of overextended analogy.)

I assume that is what the free trial is for. Which would be analogous to getting one free $50 sandwich to test out. Granted, there is the cost of switching from feeding your car a $5 sandwich to feeding it a $50 one considering the sandwich-to-gas converter has to learn how to eat each sandwich. (Is there a word for discussing a point using absurd analogies?)

French

The difference is $7/person. If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.

It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.

> If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.

$70 dollars is a lot in some organizations. Far more than it should be when compared to the overall budget. Even if a 1% boost in productivity would realize $600 to $1000 in savings, the penny wise culture in many organizations would be stuck trying to swallow a $70 payment.

Well I don't think that comparing costs this way makes too much sense. Running a successful business requires having more income than spendings. If you can achieve the same thing with $20 instead of $90 than you found a potential competitive advantage, even though not a huge one. :) Being frugal works very well for many corporations, including Amazon. I don't see that priced justified compare to JIRA based on the feature list of this tool.

If you're already able to pay salaries, you probably don't care, but for small side-project type startups without any funding but with a few people contributing, it's a _big_ difference.

I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.

That's not how large orgs do their budgets in many cases.

Totally agree with you, yet here is anecdotal evidence: as soon as I introduced it, Slack has had huge success in our company, yet when the time came for getting into paid tier (20 seats), the answer was a resounding "no" from the top of the chain.

when we do project cost estimations at the large medical device development company I work at, we use $15,000 per person month. so to answer your question, 10 people would cost $150,000.

so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.

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