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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?

#31

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

What I got after messing with it a bit:

The "cover costs" assumes your people will use the tool 8 hours a day. By the productivity you gain, it calculates how much you save in salary.

The "free up an hour" also assumes your people will use the tools 8 hours a day.

The "cover costs with" calculates how much your people must use the tool for it to eventually pay for itself. If it's larger than 8 hours, then the tool will never pay up.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#32

Post by wil421 »

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…

Sounds like your company needs to do a little more evaluation and due diligence before buy an off the shelf product. I work at “Megacorp” and it took way less than 2 years to get 20k employees and an equal number of customers onto our off the shelf ticketing platform.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#33

Post by rightbyte »

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…

I see this alot too. Products that are forced from above and not used, used under gun point etc. Also products that kinda don't fit in and where it would be just better to build it in house since the subset of functionaliy that is needed is quite small, and so on.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#34

Post by lucideer »

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…

> 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.

These are three highly subjective, very unconvincing statements. I use Github, Gitlab, multiple slackbots (some I wrote, some others wrote), managed CI, and a few search services internally in my company every day. I have no confidence that any of them are timesavers in the way that you state.

Slackbots in particular have been shown to use more time than they save (context switching is extremely costly). Github is a source-code host that ads distracting social features, notification queues, etc. all which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.

I'm not saying they don't save time in aggregate, but there's certainly arguments on either side.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#36

Post by _pdp_ »

I like the idea.

In 99% of the cases, I rather buy the service than develop it from scratch and support it long-term. Most consumer-facing services I've seen are relatively cheap. I only tend to develop existing things if I find there are some functionalities which either I cannot buy directly or they require a special setup that does not go well with security and other constraints.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#37

Post by falcolas »

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…

I see this exact same thing. Let’s take Splunk into consideration. Administrating splunk, all of our feeds into splunk, and trying to keep us from overrunning our quotas is about 1 full time person, and half a full-time person worth of DevOps work yearly. That’s in addition to the subscription costs we pay to Splunk directly.

Every piece of software requires in-house support; even pagerduty and their ilk require management time to set up schedules, adding and removing people. It’s not a lot of time, about .1 to .2 of a person’s time for all of our pageable employees, but a manager’s or leader’s time is not cheap.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#38

Post by deviantfero »

wil421 wrote: post #28
dijit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Pull request management, code reviews, CI flows, github actions, github does have many features that other git clients don't, certainly not a self hosted git or SVN repositories, and those features save a lot of time just in the ease of initial setup.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#40

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

notahacker wrote: post #22
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 t…

For smaller organizations, the "plus" could outweigh the "minus."

For example, if the "beancounter" calculation says that the SaaS tool is "not worth it," but bringing it in might significantly project the brand, then it may be worth it, in a big way.

Same with advertising, but advertising is a bit easier to measure (after the fact, as opposed to before). Brand value is really difficult to measure in any kind of empirical manner.

But a bug reporting tool, if exposed to customers, is a very important branding surface.

Error handling/reporting is a huge deal that is often neglected by tech folks. For many of us, a console print or log entry may be quite sufficient, but for an end user, they may need a lot more HI.

I've encountered some ghastly bug reporting tools that were obviously designed by techs, for techs.

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