201–210 of 453 posts
If you are already spending >$200K per employee, spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain.
Some will translate to increased revenue, a few times over, (which incentivizes the vendor to increase the price accordingly) and some will be net negative.
If you are already spending >$200K per employee, spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain.
"spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain." $200K is not a good benchmark for what companies spend. Median salary in the US is about $50K [1] Average overhead per/employee is 18-26% [2] So a $10K spend for 10% increase in productivity on someone earning about $60K ... is not a bargain. But there's a problem with this, because SaaS can be 1) Individual productivity 2) Operational produc…
- Process mismatch / impedance : The software is unlikely to be able to do exactly what you want how you want. The human likely is able
- Vendor lock in: If the SaaS decides to change how it works, or the prices you now have a leaving cost
- Expenditure on someone else's competitive advantage: If you use tool X likely there is no reason your competitor cannot. You both use it, no net advantage gained over competitor. If you develop the expertise in house (likely the harder thing) then you have an advantage over your competitor. Of course this has to be balanced with what will be your competitive advantage and what will not
- Harder to manipulate: You cannot fire 1 of your SaaS and tell the other 2 to do the work
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. Unfortunately, way too often I see execs saying "that's too expensive, we just have to do it manually" instead of using good tool. Then what happens is somebody making $100+/hour would spend several hours to do the job that would be covered by a tool that costs under $50/month.
We got well over $80k into manpower on optimizing our self-hosted app for resources so that we didn't have to tell less than a dozen big customers to upgrade their hardware before people stopped laughing right in my face for suggesting we just buy them some new rackmount equipment as a gift... That project died the following year, and I believe the opportunity costs of that work were substantially responsible for the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My bigger concerns is that it creates dependency, prices go up, and you either deal with it, or you change systems which is hugely costly. FOSS as much as possible.
FOSS is free if your time is worthless. There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.
I use FOSS when it makes sense but 90% of the time the answer has been, 'just use what AWS has.'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FOSS is free if your time is worthless. There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.
You can pay for third-party support based on FOSS, and you'll still avoid being locked in to a single supplier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone should build a webpage that does this: 1. Enter salary of engineer. 2. Enter cost per engineer of product (subscription, one time, etc.). 3. Enter required minutes to make worth your time (setup per employee can be factored in). This may already exist, but if it doesn't it could be a useful tool for Saas companies. Something you could drop into emails to potential customers ("see how much you would save"). Wo…
Should just be able to do that in your head.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FOSS is free if your time is worthless. There's plenty of situations in business where using it is an incredibly good idea. There's even more situations where you're better off just paying for a service.
You can pay for third-party support based on FOSS, and you'll still avoid being locked in to a single supplier.
2. You can still be locked into a single-supplier when you pay for third-party FOSS support. In fact, most third-party FOSS support comes from a single supplier.
3. FOSS that doesn't have a sustainable business model attached to it rarely serves the needs of enterprises. There's FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint, but what's your FOSS alternative to Tableau? Salesforce? Slack? Will you actually save money by using it, compared to just paying a vendor?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immediately made me think of Jira.
That's funny, I was thinking of all of the things people pay even more for to replace Jira.
It's a lowest common denominator product. Which is fine. I use it for anything I need to share on and Trello for organizing, "in my own head."
I won't even look at sharepoint.
You know what costs way more than SaaS? Hiring, managing, and losing people. Leveraging high-quality people with tooling, both for individual functions and for company-wide process, is a no-brainer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.
However, if you roll your own crypto payroll, the risk of one project perfectly offsets that of the other. It's a perfect hedge.