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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?

#41

Post by falcolas »

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…

FWIW, if you’re building a paging system, you’re doing it wrong. There’s open source projects which can do HA paging for you.

It requires a higher touch than pagerduty, but pagerduty isn’t 100% labor free either.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#42

Post by jeremymcanally »

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?

Permissions. I specifically remember talking to Tom and Chris about how that was really the main point of rage that spawned the idea of GitHub (and its original slogan “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass”).

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#43

Post by lukasm »

This is look at the cost, but what about value? Say, the total cost per hour (salary, insurance, benefits) is 50$, but how mych value does he/she create?

I used to do this calculation with 2x assumption. Say, a new IDE plugin saves 100 engineering hours, so it's 50 000 in cost and another 50 000, because they spend time creating features.

Is it a good assumption?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#44

Post by _jal »

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"

Counterpoint: Jira.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#46

Post by ori_b »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #42
wil421 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Permissions. I specifically remember talking to Tom and Chris about how that was really the main point of rage that spawned the idea of GitHub (and its original slogan “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass”).

Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing permissions in git?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#47

Post by mattigames »

lucideer wrote: post #34
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…

> 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…

> all which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.

Is a bit naive to think those features are the ones distracting the employees, when if you watch a developer at work 98% of the time-wasters are the strongly attractive ones: YouTube, Instagram, etc.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#48

Post by dijit »

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?

This is reductionist, I am not the first to fall in line to support github here, but lets expand on what github is instead of assuming.

Github is, primarily, managed source code hosting- but it has more components, so lets break them out:

1: Source code hosting

2: Web view

3: Issue tracking

4: Project management tracking

5: Search

6: Authentication and identity (oauth2 and "applications")

7: Documentation rendering

8: Web hosting (a-la github pages)

9: CI pipeline (github actions)

SVN replaces point 1, and poorly. How many hours do you need to manage an SVN server? Very few I would wager but it at least behooves to ask the question. And it certainly behooves to understand that you're not replacing 1:1; you're replacing many things with one, and managing the above yourself can be done cheaper, but poorer, so that "poor" imitation could cost more time for using it too.

It's a very nuanced topic but an interesting one, and reductionist questions like this are not helpful.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#49

Post by dijit »

lucideer wrote: post #34
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…

> 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…

I know a company which I will not name, that was passing source-code around with a USB drive.

Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB stick right now'. And while this is an absurd and extreme example (and a true one, crucially) you can't deny that github would have saved those developers countless hours.

Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage something on-site: but that's why this topic (and the OP's site) is interesting, how do we quantify it?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#50

Post by koheripbal »

glaberficken wrote: post #9
osel wrote: post #2

A 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

Yep... conceptually, you want to quantify, recurring gains, recurring costs, one-time gains, and one-time costs.
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