[tstrimple]

There are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in a week.

[Zababa]

As I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a side project. I don't think you could deliver more than 500€ of savings in a week because the email costs were the main costs. I agree with you than within a company this would be different, but this isn't a company.

[tashoecraft]

My comment was targeted to the person I replied to, which I interpreted as "managers only think in terms of time saved where as developers if merely left alone would roll it their own and save time and money", which is ridiculous. An engineer should think like their manager, and the manager should think like the engineer. A cost/benefit should be realized, and I think for the high majority of companies, you should not be rolling your own to save 500/year.

A newsletter is so different because merely this blogpost could have generated enough money/attention to warrant doing it, but there's an endless amount of reasoning that can be done to warrant both choices.