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At Series A / Series B, they can’t think about serious commitments (and this sounds like one) in increments smaller than $10k. I’d try that and, if you get any

At Series A / Series B, they can’t think about serious commitments (and this sounds like one) in increments smaller than $10k. I’d try that and, if you get any pushback, ask what it would have to do to be worth $10k. (A month. Bill quarterly or yearly at their option; raise prices annually to capture increase in use.) Remember that their alternative is not “spin up VPSes” it is “staff an engineering rotation to maintain this service” which will cost them minimally a million annually.

punkpeye 4y ago
For context, they were previously using BrowserStack and paying USD 999. As far as I know, they are using both services at the moment in parallel (mostly because of their year long commitment and other services that BrowserStack provides to them that fall out of scope). We already agreed to discuss the idea of doubling the capacity.
karaterobot 4y ago
That doesn't square with my experiences at startups. A $1k/mo service would have been something a manager could sign off on themselves, and all it took to do that was to get an engineer on the team be really excited about it. On the other hand, a $10K a month would have been a much harder conversation to have, falling outside the discretionary budget of a particular manager, and probably requiring meetings and demos with the head of the department to get approval.
Silhouette 4y ago
Remember that their alternative is not “spin up VPSes” it is “staff an engineering rotation to maintain this service” which will cost them minimally a million annually. But the default alternative is "continue making limited use of these integration tests and continue accepting the delays of running them slowly" which has a cost of $0 compared to status quo. What proportion of series A companies that are trying to scale up and show results quickly so they are still around to raise a series B is going to spend $1M+ on a dedicated team to run a service for this? I'm guessing 0.000%. That means the comparison isn't a very compelling argument for the leaders in that organisation because really you're just arguing that your solution is better than something they obviously weren't going to do anyway.

punkpeye 4y ago

For context, they were previously using BrowserStack and paying USD 999. As far as I know, they are using both services at the moment in parallel (mostly because of their year long commitment and other services that BrowserStack provides to them that fall out of scope). We already agreed to discuss the idea of doubling the capacity.

karaterobot 4y ago

That doesn't square with my experiences at startups. A $1k/mo service would have been something a manager could sign off on themselves, and all it took to do that was to get an engineer on the team be really excited about it. On the other hand, a $10K a month would have been a much harder conversation to have, falling outside the discretionary budget of a particular manager, and probably requiring meetings and demos with the head of the department to get approval.

Silhouette 4y ago

Remember that their alternative is not “spin up VPSes” it is “staff an engineering rotation to maintain this service” which will cost them minimally a million annually. But the default alternative is "continue making limited use of these integration tests and continue accepting the delays of running them slowly" which has a cost of $0 compared to status quo. What proportion of series A companies that are trying to scale up and show results quickly so they are still around to raise a series B is going to spend $1M+ on a dedicated team to run a service for this? I'm guessing 0.000%. That means the comparison isn't a very compelling argument for the leaders in that organisation because really you're just arguing that your solution is better than something they obviously weren't going to do anyway.