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Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

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Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#71

Post by jacknews »

punkpeye wrote: post #69
jacknews wrote: post #67

Your pricing sounds ambitious considering something like Autocad, which is a primary tool, costs about $2000/year, and you plan to charge $3000/month? Since this is essentially a cost-saving thing, I don't think it's realistic to try to charge the cost saved. If I as a customer can save $100/day by using your software, but your software costs $100/day, why bother?

Good point – it should be phrased as improved productivity. You have to think more broadly. You are not only saving engineer time. By delivering more in a shorter amount of time, you have compounding effects across the entire organization.

Indeed, you should focus the message to some marginal advantage if possible.

Eg, If I sell an animal feed supplement that increases cow weight by 1%, it means customers can increase output by 1%. If the same supplement can make racehorses 1% faster, that's something entirely different.

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#73

Post by Silhouette »

x0x0 wrote: post #66
Silhouette wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter is important because if a VPE signs a contract for $3k/mo, he/she doesn't want to sit there worrying that devs run a couple extra tests or add a few tests, etc, and boom: all of a sudden the VPE is going to the cfo to explain $10k in overage charges. Counterpoint: I have personally seen companies of the size OP is talking about run into unexpected big jumps in spending on key infrastructure and tooling bec…

Metered: significant internal and external resources are devoted to understanding aws spend. See the whole industry springing up around this, starting with Duckbill. No vpe is looking to add more to that list of things they have to understand and plan out. Flat rate or bucketed pricing is common across many dev tools. eg ci/cd: see bamboo, gitlab ci/cd (purchased in blocks), circleci (credits w/ account, more credits…

Some of the companies I mentioned were using some of the tools you mentioned. You don't necessarily avoid the price shock with tiered pricing models. It just means there's a step function and if some change does unexpectedly put you over the next threshold that just became some relatively senior people's #1 problem today.

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#74

Post by bb88 »

punkpeye wrote: post #70
bb88 wrote: post #68

Have you thought about approaching cypress and selling it for $1-2M dollars (after patenting it first of course)

I like to hack this problem. Maybe once I get bored if there is demand. For now, I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to make it work and scale.

It's possible you could sell it, and still work on it as an employee/product manager at cypress... So both could be true.

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#76

Post by verdverm »

jacknews wrote: post #67

Your pricing sounds ambitious considering something like Autocad, which is a primary tool, costs about $2000/year, and you plan to charge $3000/month? Since this is essentially a cost-saving thing, I don't think it's realistic to try to charge the cost saved. If I as a customer can save $100/day by using your software, but your software costs $100/day, why bother?

Isn't that $2000 / year per license? Where this is $36,000 / year for the whole company

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#77

Post by yuppie_scum »

punkpeye wrote: post #35
zmgsabst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay — but running 60 copies of a small EC2 for 1 min is $0.009 to $0.04 Running 100x test suites would be $0.90 to $4, in server costs. Charging 25-100x the server costs is optimistic, at best.

Unfortunately, EC2 is not an option if we want to deliver 1 minute promise. I need VMs that I can flash start with all the software needed to run the tests immediately available. The best I was able to achieve is 20 seconds using my current provider. However, they charge in hour increments. That being said, I am constantly experimenting how to reduce costs. I think the final result is going to be a fairly complicated…

Y’all need Kubernetes.

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#78

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

There is a tool from Nx in similar space, where they cache test results based on code paths.

They charge by hours saved, for example they calculate how long it would have taken to run those tests and when they serve the cache instead, they charge money for it.

Not sure if it could work in your case, but if it's saving hundreds of engineering hours, charge based on the saved time (and not on the normal runtime)

Re: Ask HN: How to price a service that saves hundreds of engineering hours?

#79

Post by CoolCold »

punkpeye wrote: post #35
zmgsabst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay — but running 60 copies of a small EC2 for 1 min is $0.009 to $0.04 Running 100x test suites would be $0.90 to $4, in server costs. Charging 25-100x the server costs is optimistic, at best.

Unfortunately, EC2 is not an option if we want to deliver 1 minute promise. I need VMs that I can flash start with all the software needed to run the tests immediately available. The best I was able to achieve is 20 seconds using my current provider. However, they charge in hour increments. That being said, I am constantly experimenting how to reduce costs. I think the final result is going to be a fairly complicated…

Sounds like you are on Hetzner.

If that's so, you can take sever for around 60$ month there and put some load there - I doubt it gonna dip your pocket for such test.

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