Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

vendr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 126 posts

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#21

Post by cavisne »

hjhffyuu57 wrote: post #2

It would be interesting to see what the corresponding figures are like for on-prem, although they would be much more difficult to calculate and would vary wildly between companies. The only thing that really stood out to me was the Google storage price increase, which seems rather large, as in way out of line in comparison to our 2023 spend and 2024 budgeting. It would also be nice to see what exactly is meant by Saa…

GCS launched as an S3 competitor (with an S3 compatible API). So their pricing was basically copy pasted from S3.

From the start though they offered more expensive to run features (a consistent list api, 1GBit transfer per file vs 100mbit for S3 at the time, Glacier-like storage with instant retrieval).

I think this pricing jump is mostly pricing it at what it always should have been. Plus a bit of the now being so focused on enterprises that the list price means less and its all about "call sales for more information".

S3 has built most of those features since then though, without a price increase.

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#25

Post by pclmulqdq »

dilyevsky wrote: post #9
londons_explore wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage prices depend on the reliability you want. Someone like Google cannot ever lose data of any customer. So if you pay for 1GB of storage, they probably actually store 5GB of data or more for you. It will be redundantly stored within the datacenter across different racks, but also stored (also redundantly) in different datacenters in case of flood/fire. Theres probably a copy on tape incase of a catastrophic sof…

> So if you pay for 1GB of storage, they probably actually store 5GB of data or more for you The actual factor is most likely around 1.4-1.5x and for sure can’t be any more than 2.2x in this day and age. Dumbest possible implementation will be “only” 3x so no it’s nowhere close to 5gb Edit: looks like it’s public so i can actually tell you that google uses RS 3,2 which gives 1.5 replication factor. When i was there a…

Those numbers are for Colossus. Blobstore, which backs the cloud object store, is different, and used to be a lot higher.

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#26

Post by dilyevsky »

pests wrote: post #10
dilyevsky wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you pay for 1GB of storage, they probably actually store 5GB of data or more for you The actual factor is most likely around 1.4-1.5x and for sure can’t be any more than 2.2x in this day and age. Dumbest possible implementation will be “only” 3x so no it’s nowhere close to 5gb Edit: looks like it’s public so i can actually tell you that google uses RS 3,2 which gives 1.5 replication factor. When i was there a…

A common problem would be throughput though. Storage capacity scales much faster than access speed. If you are storing an item only 3 times and lets say each storage location gives you 50,000 IOPS max then you can only ever service 150,000 IOPS of this item which might not be enough.

Vast majority of data rarely (if ever) gets read so you use a cache for that

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#27

Post by 15457345234 »

paulddraper wrote: post #12
Phlarp wrote: post #6

Greed.

Ah greed. A shame companies started being greedy in 2023.

Maybe it's a long term strategy - get everyone on your SaaS platforms and then, once everyone is dependent on you, start picking winners.

Or just keep raising the bar and watch people go crazy because you already have something like 1% of all the money ever printed. Why? For the sheer cruelty of it, seems to be a good answer.

A lot of decisions being made at the moment seem to be 'we could be empathetic and kind but where's the fun in that, lets rinse them out like rags' type of decisions.

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#28

Post by hjhffyuu57 »

activitypea wrote: post #15
throwawaysleep wrote: post #8

Price has little to do with cost. Price should be the maximum the market can afford while still beating ones competition.

Why? What do you mean by "the market can afford"?

Difficult to calculate that given lock-in. If you've outsourced everything infrastructure related, you aren't in the same market without substantial upfront investments being made.

Amazon/Google/Microsoft/IBM et al. all know this, it's why there are significant incentives if they know you can walk.

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#29

Post by anonymous344 »

SaaS companies are owned by billionaire-investors. or actually investor-companies. The ones at the top of the world. Same ones who get the printed dollad on their hands first to spend it before other common folks wake up to the fact that it was printed and starts loosing value

I red somewhere that 80% of dollars were printed (=made up digitally) in the last 3 years. so the inflation is now coming fast, 1$ = 20$.. that's 5x the prices. And most common things have only gone up 50 to 150%.. more to come

Re: Why SaaS prices are still going up when companies are spending less

#30

Post by dilyevsky »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #25
dilyevsky wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you pay for 1GB of storage, they probably actually store 5GB of data or more for you The actual factor is most likely around 1.4-1.5x and for sure can’t be any more than 2.2x in this day and age. Dumbest possible implementation will be “only” 3x so no it’s nowhere close to 5gb Edit: looks like it’s public so i can actually tell you that google uses RS 3,2 which gives 1.5 replication factor. When i was there a…

Those numbers are for Colossus. Blobstore, which backs the cloud object store, is different, and used to be a lot higher.

Yeah those aren’t public afaik, iirc they adjusted replication for cold data
Post reply on HN