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Amen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.” “$9 p/m???” - asked a develo

Amen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “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."

paxys 4y ago
> 2 months later. > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m." That is wildly optimistic.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  > almost done The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
skywhopper 4y ago
In my experience it’s not developers who balk at such fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly insists on trimming seats.
dijit 4y ago
Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. 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.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  There are many $1,500 per seat subscriptions that could be purchased by themselves. They usually offer some unique business value and are worth it but when free products exists that are as good or better not using them is lazy. Some services like bonusly should not be per seat.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Raidion 4y ago
  These are costs that you have determined are worth it. You don't have to pay for Postman if it's $29 a month, but it clearly saves you >$29 a month of productivity. You feel that Bonusly reduces your turnover just enough to be worth $4.5 a month. 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.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    I think the main point is that “it’s only 10 dollars s month” is a bad argument. Yes, it can be worth it, but there are gigantic swaths of things that could be worth 10 dollars to purchase and a company is only going to be willing to pay for so many of those. Postman doesn’t just need to be worth 29 dollars a month in productivity, it needs to be worth more than everything else I could convince the organization to spend 29 dollars a month on at this point in time. Especially in this industry where you’re inevitably in competition with free software as well.
- ofrzeta 4y ago
  Very often the point is that you have to buy seats for everyone (including non-technical employees) on the same plan if you want to cooperate on these platforms. Very soon it gets expensive. It doesn't make much sense to count the individual license for Jira (but it makes sense for Jetbrains).
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  Also you're hostage due to vendor lock, and you'll have to pay even if they raised a price or you had a bad quarter. That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.
rglullis 4y ago
I rather give $5/month to the guy developing the open source alternative to whatever you want to sell. The FOSS version does not depend on trapping me into an infinite subscriptiom treadmill.
- pico303 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, are there any OSS projects you’re donating $5/month to?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Yes: baserow and Taiga.
chii 4y ago
> This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. this is why you sell it to management or business owners. If they see value, they will pay for it.
Nullabillity 4y ago
Of course, this doesn't count the time wasted troubleshooting why your $9/mo piece of garbage doesn't work, or finding out that it never even tried to deliver on its promises. Or the time spent replacing it when you decide to 3x the price out of the blue. Or maybe you just decided to sunset it out of the blue because you got bored?

paxys 4y ago

> 2 months later. > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m." That is wildly optimistic.

doctor_eval 4y ago
> almost done The last 10% takes 90% of the time.

skywhopper 4y ago

In my experience it’s not developers who balk at such fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly insists on trimming seats.

dijit 4y ago

Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. 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.

ipaddr 4y ago
There are many $1,500 per seat subscriptions that could be purchased by themselves. They usually offer some unique business value and are worth it but when free products exists that are as good or better not using them is lazy. Some services like bonusly should not be per seat.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Raidion 4y ago
These are costs that you have determined are worth it. You don't have to pay for Postman if it's $29 a month, but it clearly saves you >$29 a month of productivity. You feel that Bonusly reduces your turnover just enough to be worth $4.5 a month. 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.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  I think the main point is that “it’s only 10 dollars s month” is a bad argument. Yes, it can be worth it, but there are gigantic swaths of things that could be worth 10 dollars to purchase and a company is only going to be willing to pay for so many of those. Postman doesn’t just need to be worth 29 dollars a month in productivity, it needs to be worth more than everything else I could convince the organization to spend 29 dollars a month on at this point in time. Especially in this industry where you’re inevitably in competition with free software as well.
ofrzeta 4y ago
Very often the point is that you have to buy seats for everyone (including non-technical employees) on the same plan if you want to cooperate on these platforms. Very soon it gets expensive. It doesn't make much sense to count the individual license for Jira (but it makes sense for Jetbrains).
dzikimarian 4y ago
Also you're hostage due to vendor lock, and you'll have to pay even if they raised a price or you had a bad quarter. That's huge risk, liability and often productivity gains are greatly overstated.

rglullis 4y ago

I rather give $5/month to the guy developing the open source alternative to whatever you want to sell. The FOSS version does not depend on trapping me into an infinite subscriptiom treadmill.

pico303 4y ago
Out of curiosity, are there any OSS projects you’re donating $5/month to?
- rglullis 4y ago
  Yes: baserow and Taiga.

chii 4y ago

> This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. this is why you sell it to management or business owners. If they see value, they will pay for it.

Nullabillity 4y ago

Of course, this doesn't count the time wasted troubleshooting why your $9/mo piece of garbage doesn't work, or finding out that it never even tried to deliver on its promises. Or the time spent replacing it when you decide to 3x the price out of the blue. Or maybe you just decided to sunset it out of the blue because you got bored?