“Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.”
“$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast
“That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.”
2 months later.
"Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs:
Gitlab: 19/m
Docker: 24/m
Slack: 12.5/m
Copilot: 19/m
Office: 12.5/m
Tailscale: 15/m
oslash: 6/mo
pagerduty: 41/m
Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m
Calendly: 16/m
Bonusly: 4.5/m
Snyk: 98/m
Figma: 42/m
Lens: 20/m
Postman: 29/m
Sourcegraph: 99/m
Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m
or:
Jetbrains: All: 78/m
This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group.
That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y
This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period.
So there can easily be overages.
So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce).
That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
You either need these tools to make engineers, sales and other people to provide value and generate revenue, or you don't.
> That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
Firstly, what's take home salary has anything to do with this? Are Swedish developers paying for these tools out of their pocket? These are business expenses. It's disingenuous to use that number.
Secondly, so what? How much do you think it costs for a pilot to fly a plane? The software they need? The hardware they need? While developer needs a $1,000 MacBook and a few optional double digit monthly expenses to generate insane value.
Again, this list is exactly why I don’t want to sell to developers. Because from business point of view these are such minuscule $20 p/m expenses for the value they provide, especially for one of the most highest paying employees these days. And if you think they don't provide enough value, you just cancel the subscription.
It's the cost of making business. And compared to other industries, we in tech are spoiled and we have it very easy.
That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.
Whether you buy it, borrow it or build it; you’re locked in to the chosen solution.
Homegrown solutions are often harder to escape from than commercial or FOSS solutions.
It’s sometimes easier to escape from one commercial solution to another as companies will provide migration tools and docs as part of their competitive strategy.
You can mitigate solution lock-in through good architecture, but you can never eliminate the cost of change.
Example - I was working with jira server for several years at pretty small company. As business grew, there were better and worse moments and sometimes there were more important costs, than another yearly support fee.
Atlassian decided to drop this model and tries to force everyone to the cloud. They say that migration will take 9+ months.
That means if they ever do such change again it will take full annual cost of the license to get rid of them, with no option to avoid it.
For commercial software (or FOSS-as-appliance) then you're stuck going along wherever your vendor wants to take you.
Not saying that people couldn't make licenses a bit more friendly. But saying it's expensive to purchase tools you could just not purchase if they weren't worth it doesn't make sense.
Especially in this industry where you’re inevitably in competition with free software as well.
> "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
That is wildly optimistic.
The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
this is why you sell it to management or business owners. If they see value, they will pay for it.
