Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted, Jira ends up costing way more than $24,000 yearly, because all plugins need to be purchased for all users, and Jira tends to require employing at least one full-time admin. All-told, it's more in line with a few hundred thousand dollars yearly. With that said, $1.2 million for 2,000 users yearly for a code-search tool is some pretty insane Kool-Aid pricing, and it prevents me from even recommending it to my…
A JIRA installation with 2,000 users probably has many fewer developers, and you'd only pay for Sourcegraph for developers. For customers where this makes a big difference, we work with them on the pricing. But if you're a large company with 2,000 engineers, then you could be spending nearly a half-billion dollars on engineering salaries alone. If Sourcegraph makes your developers at least 0.5% more productive, then…
A couple things:
a) $500 million / 2,000 engineers is $250,000 per engineer. Even if you take benefits and equipment / licensing costs into consideration, that's really high. Most enterprises aren't located in Silicon Valley and don't pay Silicon Valley engineering salaries.
b) I don't doubt your 0.5% figure, and the argument about the best tools money can buy goes all the way back to the Joel Test, but engineers aren't the ones who make the decision whether to buy these tools, the enterprise bean counters do. Do you have any evidence, even anecdotal evidence, to back up your 0.5% number? Because otherwise, the bean counters just see yet another toy that engineering wants to put on the budget, and the budget is always too restricted to add toys to the budget. Remember how long it took most enterprises to understand that multiple monitors aided productivity? And that's practically obvious. Why does Sourcegraph get a pass? What kind of concrete evidence can engineers pass along to their bean counters to justify the cost of Sourcegraph's licenses?
edit: I want to add, Sourcegraph isn't going to be paid only for engineers. It'll also be paid for QA, engineering management, infrastructure/ops... eventually, everyone wants to store something in version control.