| > either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend My statement was based on these two statements of yours: > Art - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software > Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling I read that and thought, "Okay, well, I want a lot of solid software, so $2k/yr ... check!" I guess that's not what you intended. :) > Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields In any field, the approach I would take is to think about the SaaS products that a professional uses, because that's where the bulk of the software spend is these days. In software dev we have things like GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Logrocket, AWS, GCP, Vercel, Figma, Canva, Slack, Discord. I spot-checked GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month or $252/user/yr: https://github.com/pricing Slack is $150/user/yr for business, so enterprise is probably 2x that ~= $300/user/yr: https://slack.com/pricing Seems like at Salesforce $300/yr is the low end, and they go up to $3600/user/yr(!): https://tech.co/crm-software/salesforce-pricing-how-much-doe... Let's say the average enterprise SaaS login is $250 or $300/yr. Six or eight of those gets us to $2k/user/yr, and six or eight SaaS logins seems pretty reasonable to me. Note that in the OP blog post the 2k/user/yr number is arrived at from the top down, not from the bottom up as we're doing here. What I'm interested in in this thread is cross-checking the order of magnitude ... so far this thread confirms for me that 2k/user/yr is probably in the right ballpark for large companies to spend on their open source dependencies. It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning. I'm sure people who control IT budgets at large companies have visibility into their average annual per-user software spend. It would be interesting to hear their view. :^) [edit - formatting] |
> GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month
Github has a $4/month pricing plan. The companies I deal with all use internal source control, paying zero to github.
>Slack is $150/user/yr for business,
Of the 4 corporate slack channels I am art of, only one is paid, using the 6.67/mo/user version, for $80/person/yr. So on average these 4 run $20/user/year.
Want more data? Here's [1] Stackoverflow 2020 developer report. Half report using Slack. If that are like my experience, then maybe 1 in 4 uses paying, and maybe that's the low tier. If that still holds, 1 in 8 devs from StackOverflow (which is a very select group) is paying for Slack.
>Salesforce
Wait, what? Are you claiming every dev needs Salesforce? I know precisely zero with it, and I run a decent amount of seminars across multiple companies. Are you a developer that uses Salesforce regularly? This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
And then you throw in some vague SaaS products, needing to get to 6 or 8? Go ahead and tell me which 6-6 Salesforce style SaaS things the average dev uses.... It will be interesting to see what you pick.
So sorry, it seems you're more than just making stuff up, picking the highest values at each choice, to try to justify the prices.
>It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning.
I work directly under the owner and VP of tech in one company, for which I've been doing so for almost two decades, and have known a decent amount of their their finances for a long time. I also have talked at length with the Pres, VP, and head of HR at the other company I regularly work with. I own a profitable company for over 15 years now. All of these are heavily software dev houses. I have a decent number of friends that own dev companies or are high enough up to know the answer to this, and I've regularly asked them how their internal cost structure breaks down, mostly to compare to mine and to refine my understanding of how company finances work. I'm pretty sure I have decent insight to how this works.
For the first I write the proposals to get new software in, I see the counts, I price options, for a large amount of the developers. I see the numbers there.
At the second, from talking to those who do exactly this, I am quite clear their rates and overhead is in line with what I expect from such companies. I could ask directly, but since I work with a lot of devs there and see the tooling, there's no need. $2k/dev/year is a ton of money.
At the third, since it's my company, I see every nickel. It's also no where $2k/dev/year. Buying hardware like 3d printers, laser cutters, PCs, etc., ups the per person spend, but even there it's amortized over people and time and still not likely 2k/person/year spend.
It sounds like I do have expertise in this area and you are missing it.
[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...