Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

If you're a relatively small company looking to use a plug-and-play SaaS product with a modest subscription fee to serve some business purpose this is a great tool to get some quick and dirty numbers on whether it would be better to use or maybe build in house or go another route.

If you're purchasing some large, highly configurable enterprise tool (with high implementation and support costs) that all 1k of your employees will use daily and you'd like to understand cost/benefit, other means of calculating this should be used (and it would likely require days to weeks of multiple people's time to make such a calculation).

It's not just the cost of an employee salary per hour... Is the opportunity cost of everything that employee could have instead done.

After all it isn't as though with more money you can just immediately get more fully ramped sophisticated employees to add value... All of that is complex.

1) Brand reinforcement/damage.

This one is really hard to quantify, but can mean the difference between the life, or the death, of the corporation. If the tool we choose causes some damage to the brand (like not giving us the ability to display the brand in an appropriate manner), or introduces a brand-damaging problem (like causing a particular kind of service to have an extra step or two, or even amplify customer pain), then there could be issues.

On the plus side, it could also significantly fortify a brand, by doing things like having the brand appear in places that were disregarded, or considered "out of reach," or it could amplify the advantages of a brand-connected service.

Branding is a "dark art" to many literal-minded folks like engineers, but it is unbelievably valuable. It should always be considered, when thinking about things like this.

This morning, I had this demonstrated to me in a visceral manner. I made an order yesterday, and asked for expedited delivery. When I made the order, it said the expedited delivery would arrive today, but when I received the confirmation, it said the order would arrive tomorrow.

Sound familiar? Amazon is notorious for this nasty little trick. Most of the time, it's Prime Delivery, which means we don't really have much room to complain.

It wasn't Amazon. I won't name the corporation, but it is one that is synonymous with extremely high (arrogant, even) quality.

This silly little trick, with a cheap, third-party item, caused brand damage with a loyal customer that has spent six figures with them. I won't drop them, and the world won't stop turning because I won't get my item until tomorrow, but the simple fact that they did the "shipping bait and switch" on me, means that I'll never use them again for this kind of purchase.

That's brand damage.

To add insult to injury, when I tried contacting them about it, I had to run the gauntlet of what I call the "AI Picador," which throws as many roadblocks as possible in your path, before allowing connection to a human.

This workflow ensures that I will be steaming mad before I get to the human, and it's all I can do to avoid venting to them (it isn't their fault -it's their bosses').

2) Staff morale.

Will bringing in the service reinforce or damage staff morale? It may help folks do their jobs a lot easier (good), or it may result in a lot of folks losing their jobs (bad, or very bad, depending on many factors, like how the layoffs are done, and how the folks that remain are treated).

3) Dependence/Addiction

If bringing in a dependency ties us to a corporation/language/toolset, is that good or bad? It may be quite good, if it's a good service, and a good corporation, but it could also be incredibly bad.

Add "One-time payment" option to the cost of the service.

This could be used to decide if you allocate resources to implement a new feature in an internal system.