Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
isitworththecost.com
Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#2A simple check on whether purchasing a service is worth the cost - built in an afternoon in response to a previous HN discussion [1].
A few people expressed interest in embedding something similar in a landing page, so I've open-sourced the code for others to use if they wish.
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#3Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of having to deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good SaaS alternative exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance department"
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#4First thing that came into mind:
Is It Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#5A simple check on whether purchasing a service is worth the cost - built in an afternoon in response to a previous HN discussion [1]. A few people expressed interest in embedding something similar in a landing page, so I've open-sourced the code for others to use if they wish. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22497093
That's great! Thanks for taking the time to build it.
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#6This is great! Walking through the numbers mentally kinda works, but it seems people are always suspicious they're being had. Seeing it live will be very reassuring.
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#7Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of having to deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good SaaS alternative exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance department"
I was going to say. The biggest cost for most organizations is the recruitment and training costs of an employee that leaves due to demotivation stemming from having to do "robotic" tasks.
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#8Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of having to deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good SaaS alternative exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance department"
A cynic might suggest 'cognitive cost of having to use overblown SaaS tools instead of a simple list, calendar event or email/chat message' and 'time spent making additional records in or collecting vanity metrics from the SaaS to justify its continued existence' ought to be in there in the interests of balance.
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#9A simple check on whether purchasing a service is worth the cost - built in an afternoon in response to a previous HN discussion [1]. A few people expressed interest in embedding something similar in a landing page, so I've open-sourced the code for others to use if they wish. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22497093
Under "Service cost" it could use an option for "one time purchase fee". Obviously that is going to create special cases for the "amortizations" output
Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
#10This seems really flawed.
Let's plug in numbers. This says that if a service costs 125$/month/employee and I have 1000 employees ($125000/month) I will save ~5 million a year.
However a service costing 1.5 million at such a company has other costs.
Namely that a product that costs that much almost always needs an in house support team. I have never seen the case where an expensive product also didn't need 2-3 people in just to maintain and support it. But the employee time savings is still worth it.
The next cost is much harder. In the tool we said this will save everyone 1 hour a day. However saving people time is not normally what a tool actually does. PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts. Alerts that come from another tool that must be set up. At 40/person/month for 1000 people, that is 40,000 a month for zero "saved time." The value of pagerduty for very different.
But anyone who has been in the field has seen, that list hidden cost is that a paid service isn't normally a perfect fit. It is missing something, or your particular use case doesn't map cleanly. You then have an army of people working around the tool, saving negative time. The business might have reasons to still use that tool. But saving time is not one of them.
So seeing this tool tell me that a service which cost $2,000,000 a year is going to save me $5,000,000 feels like naive marketing nonsense. And it isn't even marketing a product.