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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 interne

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...
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  AWS can easily go into 6 figures/month, so you could get a decent bus for that too, and maybe even a plane in some years of operation :) I'm not against paid tools in general. My company pays for many - lots of IntelliJ licenses (at least XXk eur/year), jira server (hard to summarize over the years, but probably at least couple of cars worth) and many others, but we prefer "pay once and own it" model, because we updated when we needed. Sometimes we pushed this for later and spent cash for raises and/or additional people, which were more important than minor software updates. That's why I really dislike subscription model - you don't have this choice - either you pay now or you're out. Don't like new prices? Feel free to migrate for couple of months (while still paying). > 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... We actually host ton of stuff on-prem. Isn't nearly as bad as people like to frame it. Of course we have some subscribtions, because it's business not crusade, but in general keeping mandatory recurring costs low, proved to be good strategy.

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...

dzikimarian 4y ago
AWS can easily go into 6 figures/month, so you could get a decent bus for that too, and maybe even a plane in some years of operation :) I'm not against paid tools in general. My company pays for many - lots of IntelliJ licenses (at least XXk eur/year), jira server (hard to summarize over the years, but probably at least couple of cars worth) and many others, but we prefer "pay once and own it" model, because we updated when we needed. Sometimes we pushed this for later and spent cash for raises and/or additional people, which were more important than minor software updates. That's why I really dislike subscription model - you don't have this choice - either you pay now or you're out. Don't like new prices? Feel free to migrate for couple of months (while still paying). > 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... We actually host ton of stuff on-prem. Isn't nearly as bad as people like to frame it. Of course we have some subscribtions, because it's business not crusade, but in general keeping mandatory recurring costs low, proved to be good strategy.