[pmontra]

$49 times 2,000 is $98,000, not around $10,000. Yet your argument still holds. There are many reasons for that.

1. You are paying a developer that works 100% on that, year after year, and not a hire that won't be there when something goes wrong in the future after an OS update, new hardware, anything. This is basically your argument. Let me add:

2. In some parts of the world far away from SV but still in the West, $100k are about two years of gross developer salary, not what the developer actually gets at the end of the month. Point 1 still holds. Where it's 10 years of salary maybe companies could be tempted by a custom solution.

3. You are giving $49 per server to that developer but you are probably getting more per server from your customers. If you have thousands of servers you probably have a viable business, so that's just yet another cost of doing business.

[dabber]

Hah, yes I definitely fumbled on the math there. Thanks for re-articulating what I was trying to get across much better than I did!