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Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

isitworththecost.com

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Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#21

Post by georgyo »

irjustin wrote: post #19
georgyo wrote: post #10

This 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…

This complaint seems really flawed. > PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts. Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally the time save. The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the same way as any other tool. Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest amount? That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups who make this decisio…

Perhaps I was overly grumpy. But I get pulled into these discussions a lot. The company now has a very strong newly (2 years) developed "buy not build" mentality.

Half the products we have bought have had full internal teams to support. And many don't suite our needs, so we have enitre development teams building abstractions that are more complex than the product we bought so we can use the product we bought. And some of those abstractions have been in development for 2 years so no one can use the product yet.

My only point is that buying vs building is complex. When you boil that down to a tool that essentially says always buy, it causes a bit of PTSD for me.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#22

Post by notahacker »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #18

Good tool, but, as someone mentioned, there are a number of other factors. 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 particul…

If you're big enough for your brand image to be damaged by your bug reporting tool, customer analytics or payment flow having a third party logo, you're probably more in the realms of paying for the enterprise grade white labelling offering than 'are ten seats worth the money' anyway. Of course you can definitely wreck your sales with spammy use of email automation tools or evasive customer service, but that's more to do with how tools are used than the third party involvement.

And if SaaS is valuable enough to actually replace staff you've outgrown the simple decision making aid too, although I agree that you can dent morale at the margin by introducing SaaS oriented towards micromanagement or somewhat improve it with less crappy processes even with the simplest of software changes.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#23

Post by dijit »

projektfu wrote: post #13

I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the analysis. 1. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? 2. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? 3. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time required as supervisor? 4. From a financial point of view, I’m still…

> I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time?

Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.

GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.

I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate.

Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service.

But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself.

> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage?

There’s two points to this argument;

1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me?

2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the office 9hrs per day.

The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0]

There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to “needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase).

(I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone)

Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that. I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less.

You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally check out.

[0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend...

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#24

Post by dtech »

glenjamin wrote: post #3

Might 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"

> time spent wrangling the finance department

Oh god, those cases when you'd love to try some tool or increase the plan to go over an auditing line but no-one has the energy to push it through the bureaucracy

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#25

Post by femto »

bluGill wrote: post #17
redwood wrote: post #16

What's this type of calculator often misses is how nuanced and complex is to estimate the cost of employee time. 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.

There is also the cost of not understanding details that you left to someone else. If you save time but no longer know what is happening you can get into big trouble when those details matter.

And the related, more general, risk of an additional external dependency: what happens if the service disappears, changes or goes wrong?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#26

Post by onion2k »

georgyo wrote: post #10

This 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…

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.

$125/month is the price, not the cost. You need to plug in the full cost.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#27

Post by PascLeRasc »

Flimm wrote: post #15

This looks really cool. I put in some numbers for a service that I am considering, and the answer was the opposite of what I was intuitively expecting, which proves the need for something like this. Some feedback: - s/(one person)/(per person)/g - The "cover costs" section doesn't really make sense to me. For example, in one example, the breakdown says that I will burn $10000 extra, but that I will also cover costs w…

I've been going back and forth on whether or not Hey is worth it for me. I really liked my trial, but $100 just feels like a high price. But according to this calculator I'd only have to value my free time at $3/hour to start "saving money".

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#28

Post by wil421 »

dijit wrote: post #23
projektfu wrote: post #13

I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the analysis. 1. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? 2. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? 3. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time required as supervisor? 4. From a financial point of view, I’m still…

> I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? Sure you have, albeit by another name likely. GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week. I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate. Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all…

How does Github save time over the predecessors like self hosted a Git or SVN repository?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#29

Post by kdelok »

georgyo wrote: post #21
irjustin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This complaint seems really flawed. > PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts. Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally the time save. The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the same way as any other tool. Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest amount? That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups who make this decisio…

Perhaps I was overly grumpy. But I get pulled into these discussions a lot. The company now has a very strong newly (2 years) developed "buy not build" mentality. Half the products we have bought have had full internal teams to support. And many don't suite our needs, so we have enitre development teams building abstractions that are more complex than the product we bought so we can use the product we bought. And som…

Even if it does boil down to that, there might still be value in ranking the savings per service you buy in. Except for a core product, it is almost always going to be the case that buying in is cheaper than building it. However, having limited resources, it's valuable to work out what tools could give you the best value for money, and which others are a more marginal call (given the uncertainty about support work etc.)

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#30

Post by wil421 »

irjustin wrote: post #19
georgyo wrote: post #10

This 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…

This complaint seems really flawed. > PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts. Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally the time save. The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the same way as any other tool. Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest amount? That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups who make this decisio…

Agreed. Pagerduty and similar notifications systems can be life savers for support people. Especially if they are integrated into a ticketing or event management system.
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