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Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

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Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#261

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #254
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

> but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost Companies do stupid shit all the time. It only takes one person with authority to spend money to sign up for a service. Personally I've seen many software subscriptions that are complete garbage.

“We’ve seen companies buy the same subscription over and over again—even within the same department,” he added.

I think that's telling

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#262

Post by paulddraper »

XCSme wrote: post #209
robbiemitchell wrote: post #179

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.

There is also the option of buying self-hosted products and installing them on your own server. The setup time is usually the same, but you only pay $5/mo for the server and maybe $100 one time for the product, instead of paying $100/mo for the service. This is also multiplied by X, where X is the number of subscriptions you have.

This is usually a bad idea.

The times is a good idea is something like Confluence or JIRA where the functionality of the cloud hosted version is hobbled compared to the on-prem version. (In that case, due to plugin security.)

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#264

Post by paulddraper »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

Yeah, those numbers seem very suspicious. Cherry-picked maybe.

Fifty dollars a month is a decently pricey subscription (like a lot more than Slack, JIRA, Lucidchart, Office, etc.), and you have twenty of those for every employee?

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#265

Post by SonicScrub »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

That number doesn't surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical/aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here's the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search:

1) $35,000

2) $15,000

3) $10,000

4) $4,500

So I'm costing the company ~$65,000 per year in software licenses alone.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#266

Post by hinkley »

duaoebg wrote: post #203
hinkley wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lol, I do this. My customers would often try to run my software on dusty old servers and then complain that it's slow, so now I just send them the hardware for free.

Different team, we did a cluster install and they were getting 10% of our advertised transaction rate. Something was clearly off. I commented “did they plug the whole thing into a 10Mb hub?”

They had. We sent someone eight timezones away to find that out.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#267

Post by swiley »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

MS office is probably one of them.

Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#268

Post by cercatrova »

stiray wrote: post #245
JakeWesorick wrote: post #11

Lots of the SaaS products we use mean we don't have to hire more employees. So I'm not sure if dollars per employee is a meaningful stat.

Just an interesting idea, if no one wants to have employees (lets face it, they are a mess, they waste oxygen, they fart, producing CO2, are corona virus friendly, produce road accidents... and you need to pay them so they can live) maybe everyone is having wrong bussiness plan. Whole world should transform to produce only SAAS products for SAAS people as they are the only customers who will in long term still have m…

I like your first sentence, but unsarcastically. Companies should always strive to do more with fewer employees by automating them away.

As for the rest of your argument, most people are not like you, as they will not want to spend time setting up their own mail server. For companies this is doubly true, as they will likely spend more money setting it up, maintaining it, and upgrading it, than the subscription actually costs.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#269

Post by downrightmike »

runako wrote: post #25
sciencewolf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully loaded costs (health benefits, 401k matching, cost of computer, HR business partners, etc.) for an employee are roughly 2x what their salary is. So yeah, 200k is a good estimate.

That's still very high. Average salary is much lower than $100k in the US. Even among college grads with 10+ years of experience, $100k is still a high-end job paying a high-end salary. It's nowhere near the average.

Take out all the low wage workers that don't use any apps, and the average goes up.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#270

Post by cercatrova »

tehlike wrote: post #219
fludlight wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.

If rolling your own crypto, you mean cryptocoin, that sounds like a great idea to increase wealth :)

Cryptography not cryptocurrency.
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