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I don’t think only cloud is the problem (if any). What I see in every company I join is a huge list of saas they depend on: - lokalise - newrelic/datadog - o

I don’t think only cloud is the problem (if any). What I see in every company I join is a huge list of saas they depend on: - lokalise - newrelic/datadog - opsgenie - gitlab/github - slack - atlassian suite - google/microsoft suite - HR (e.g., personio) - miro - and a large etc. These saas charge per month per user. As soon as your company has a couple hundred employees that require such platforms, we are not talking pennies anymore.

monkaiju 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. Also hosting alternatives to many of these, like Mattermost over Slack, is not difficult and is usually more performant.
sharemywin 4y ago
I can see that being an issue.
simonbarker87 4y ago
Sure but building and maintaining those types of tolls internally probably costs more than paying those companies to provide it for you. Paying for a host of proprietary cloud products from AWS of the like vs cloud VMs isn’t the same comparison.
- tkiolp4 4y ago
  Well, it’s not that such platforms are always needed, though. For instance you may rely on confluence so that managers can write and share documents… well, why not let them write and share documents via github/gitlab (assuming your company is already using these platforms)? Common answer is: managers don’t know how to use github/gitlab. But that’s a sad scenario. Perhaps the company should hire managers who know how to use (or are willing to learn!) github/gitlab? I bet such managers end up being better than the regular ones.
mywittyname 4y ago
My company (sub-1000 heads) is undertaking a project to seriously evaluate costs of all these services. Because you're right, there's a 10x-my-salary annual cost savings to be had after just a rudimentary analysis of unused tool license costs. We are lucky that we auto-provisions tool access, and use Okta, which makes analyzing and acting on this data pretty trivial. I think a lot of these SaaS companies are feeling the squeeze and pressure to be profitable. A few that we've been customers of since they were wee companies are jacking up rates by 3-5x. The value of an $8k product has a lot lower expectations than a $40k one.

monkaiju 4y ago

Couldn't agree more. Also hosting alternatives to many of these, like Mattermost over Slack, is not difficult and is usually more performant.

sharemywin 4y ago

I can see that being an issue.

simonbarker87 4y ago

Sure but building and maintaining those types of tolls internally probably costs more than paying those companies to provide it for you. Paying for a host of proprietary cloud products from AWS of the like vs cloud VMs isn’t the same comparison.

tkiolp4 4y ago
Well, it’s not that such platforms are always needed, though. For instance you may rely on confluence so that managers can write and share documents… well, why not let them write and share documents via github/gitlab (assuming your company is already using these platforms)? Common answer is: managers don’t know how to use github/gitlab. But that’s a sad scenario. Perhaps the company should hire managers who know how to use (or are willing to learn!) github/gitlab? I bet such managers end up being better than the regular ones.

mywittyname 4y ago

My company (sub-1000 heads) is undertaking a project to seriously evaluate costs of all these services. Because you're right, there's a 10x-my-salary annual cost savings to be had after just a rudimentary analysis of unused tool license costs. We are lucky that we auto-provisions tool access, and use Okta, which makes analyzing and acting on this data pretty trivial. I think a lot of these SaaS companies are feeling the squeeze and pressure to be profitable. A few that we've been customers of since they were wee companies are jacking up rates by 3-5x. The value of an $8k product has a lot lower expectations than a $40k one.