4 ms·

Three things: * This hour rate is absurdly high for huge part of the world. Try $20. * This argument is used by every SaaS ever. If you want to use everything

Three things: * This hour rate is absurdly high for huge part of the world. Try $20. * This argument is used by every SaaS ever. If you want to use everything in that model, you would need 20 of them. At least. * Slack is $7 a month. Office package starts at $6. Github starts at $4. These are huge tools that make work possible. Small random tool priced at the same level is expensive.

fragmede 4y ago
1) It's USD which implies, largely, that we're in the US. If we want to talk about global wealth inequality, that's a whole other can of worms. But, fair, $100 is rather high. Calendly is used by a lot of white-collar workers though and who generally make more than $20/hr. But sure, let's redo the math at $20 on both sides. $20 means $40 total, divided by 60 * 10 gets us $6 and change per scheduling, or 3 meetings a month to make it worth it. 2) Yes? I don't know about 20, but 1 project mgmt: Trello/Monday/Clickup/etc 2 if programming, github/gitlab/etc 3 an Office suite (MS or Google Docs), 4 Email (gmail/office365) 5 comms (Slack) 6 web hosting (squarespace/wix/godaddy/roll-your-own on AWS/GCP/Azure) 7 scheduling cal.com/calendly 8 healthcare 9 payroll (gusto) 10 bookkeeping (pilot.com or quickbooks) 11 401k Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm genuinely curious to hear what I've missed! That's besides the point though. Tools do a relatively specific thing. You can't use Slack to pay employees instead of Gusto, Slack doesn't even have a way to transfer money! So you need a tool that does the job that you need done. If it takes 20, it takes 20. Just because a particular SaaS company uses that argument doesn't mean you have to buy their service. If you can do without it, then don't buy it! 3) Yes but that small random tool does a very specific job. I don't care if hammers are free and screwdrivers are expensive, if I need a screwdriver, I need a screwdriver and I'll pay whatever it costs. (fine, sure there's some point at which point you can reengineer something to use a hammer if a screwdriver's that expensive, but if you're smart enough to make that point you're smart enough to get my point) Anyway, my real question is what is it about making tools that makes people so cheap? And not just software either, Harbor Freight has been making everything out of Chinesium which is ludicrously cheap, to Craftsman's detriment. If you go and see a movie you really like in a good theater, you're happy you paid for a ticket and ate the overpriced popcorn, when you could have torrented it for free at home and watched it on your phone. There's something about tools that brings out the cheapness in, at least me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it simply because we need so many of them? https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ is all too true, but then Dwarf Fortress and they became millionaires overnight! Not that I begrudge them that money, but just that like, human psychology is so interesting!
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  1) I work half of the globe from US. We've half of the contracts in USD, valuation in USD and use the same tools as people on your side of the pond (yay internet). Sending invites via outlook (desktop app, paid once) is free and usually good enough :-) 2) IDE (Jetbrains), knowledge repository (wiki,confluence, notion), on-call management (pager duty, jira SD), error monitoring (sentry) - just a few from the top of my head. AWS pricing and size of the offering is topic on its own. 3) it's not being cheap. At least not only that. Take a look at this summary [1] I stumbled upon recently. According to this calculation tools may account for almost 20% of recurring expenses in Sweden. Sweden is far from being poor. What's more important - you must pay, because otherwise you lose it (hope it never happens to my screwdrivers or popcorn). This is huge liability, that may stop your company from operating. Often really unnecessary. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375755
  - fragmede 4y ago
    1) thank you for that perspective. Mind sharing which country? I'm always interested in regional variances. The Apple Store deals with this by not allowing developers to set prices directly, and instead, lets them set a price point, and then Apple handles the foreign currency exchange rate and cultural differences about the price points.
    - dzikimarian 4y ago
      Sure - it's easy to find going through my comments on HN anyway. Poland.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    2) This is a good list of tools! We could further into AWS and say there's a app server, a database, a pub/sub, a load balancer, and a payment processor.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    3) Software devs are getting off lightly! If you need to do high-end CAD, Solidworks is $167/month with an $8,000 upfront cost. Looking at other industries, a general contractor's tools are several thousand dollars, same for an auto mechanic. Going even further, the "tools" for a bus driver (aka a bus) costs $500k; a pilot, $x00 million; a cruise ship captain likely tops the list, with cruise ships construction costs being over a billion dollars! What's the switch that flips through for tools, when compared to something like dwarf fortress, which made the brothers into millionaires as soon as they put it up for sale. They worked hard at it for many years to get to that place, but it's that people rushed to give them money to support them. No one's doing that for OpenSSL or Cal.com. If you have to view things that way, that summary is bloated. stop paying for slack, use google starter for $6/mo instead of microsoft or google standard, don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...

fragmede 4y ago

1) It's USD which implies, largely, that we're in the US. If we want to talk about global wealth inequality, that's a whole other can of worms. But, fair, $100 is rather high. Calendly is used by a lot of white-collar workers though and who generally make more than $20/hr. But sure, let's redo the math at $20 on both sides. $20 means $40 total, divided by 60 * 10 gets us $6 and change per scheduling, or 3 meetings a month to make it worth it. 2) Yes? I don't know about 20, but 1 project mgmt: Trello/Monday/Clickup/etc 2 if programming, github/gitlab/etc 3 an Office suite (MS or Google Docs), 4 Email (gmail/office365) 5 comms (Slack) 6 web hosting (squarespace/wix/godaddy/roll-your-own on AWS/GCP/Azure) 7 scheduling cal.com/calendly 8 healthcare 9 payroll (gusto) 10 bookkeeping (pilot.com or quickbooks) 11 401k Those are just the ones off the top of my head. I'm genuinely curious to hear what I've missed! That's besides the point though. Tools do a relatively specific thing. You can't use Slack to pay employees instead of Gusto, Slack doesn't even have a way to transfer money! So you need a tool that does the job that you need done. If it takes 20, it takes 20. Just because a particular SaaS company uses that argument doesn't mean you have to buy their service. If you can do without it, then don't buy it! 3) Yes but that small random tool does a very specific job. I don't care if hammers are free and screwdrivers are expensive, if I need a screwdriver, I need a screwdriver and I'll pay whatever it costs. (fine, sure there's some point at which point you can reengineer something to use a hammer if a screwdriver's that expensive, but if you're smart enough to make that point you're smart enough to get my point) Anyway, my real question is what is it about making tools that makes people so cheap? And not just software either, Harbor Freight has been making everything out of Chinesium which is ludicrously cheap, to Craftsman's detriment. If you go and see a movie you really like in a good theater, you're happy you paid for a ticket and ate the overpriced popcorn, when you could have torrented it for free at home and watched it on your phone. There's something about tools that brings out the cheapness in, at least me, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it simply because we need so many of them? https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ is all too true, but then Dwarf Fortress and they became millionaires overnight! Not that I begrudge them that money, but just that like, human psychology is so interesting!

dzikimarian 4y ago
1) I work half of the globe from US. We've half of the contracts in USD, valuation in USD and use the same tools as people on your side of the pond (yay internet). Sending invites via outlook (desktop app, paid once) is free and usually good enough :-) 2) IDE (Jetbrains), knowledge repository (wiki,confluence, notion), on-call management (pager duty, jira SD), error monitoring (sentry) - just a few from the top of my head. AWS pricing and size of the offering is topic on its own. 3) it's not being cheap. At least not only that. Take a look at this summary [1] I stumbled upon recently. According to this calculation tools may account for almost 20% of recurring expenses in Sweden. Sweden is far from being poor. What's more important - you must pay, because otherwise you lose it (hope it never happens to my screwdrivers or popcorn). This is huge liability, that may stop your company from operating. Often really unnecessary. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375755
- fragmede 4y ago
  1) thank you for that perspective. Mind sharing which country? I'm always interested in regional variances. The Apple Store deals with this by not allowing developers to set prices directly, and instead, lets them set a price point, and then Apple handles the foreign currency exchange rate and cultural differences about the price points.
  - dzikimarian 4y ago
    Sure - it's easy to find going through my comments on HN anyway. Poland.
- fragmede 4y ago
  2) This is a good list of tools! We could further into AWS and say there's a app server, a database, a pub/sub, a load balancer, and a payment processor.
- fragmede 4y ago
  3) Software devs are getting off lightly! If you need to do high-end CAD, Solidworks is $167/month with an $8,000 upfront cost. Looking at other industries, a general contractor's tools are several thousand dollars, same for an auto mechanic. Going even further, the "tools" for a bus driver (aka a bus) costs $500k; a pilot, $x00 million; a cruise ship captain likely tops the list, with cruise ships construction costs being over a billion dollars! What's the switch that flips through for tools, when compared to something like dwarf fortress, which made the brothers into millionaires as soon as they put it up for sale. They worked hard at it for many years to get to that place, but it's that people rushed to give them money to support them. No one's doing that for OpenSSL or Cal.com. If you have to view things that way, that summary is bloated. stop paying for slack, use google starter for $6/mo instead of microsoft or google standard, don't pay for tailscale, host your own go link system for $0, host your own gitlab so you're not paying for jira or gitlab, wtf is bonusly; VSCode is free...