[SkyPuncher]

I know it's easy to be critical, but I'm having trouble seeing the ROI on this.

This is a $20k/year savings. Perhaps, I'm not aware of the pricing in the Indian market (where this startup is), but that simply doesn't seem like a good use of time. There's an actual cost of doing these implementations. Both in hard financial dollars (salaries of the people doing the work) and the trade-offs of de prioritizing other other.

[paxys]

The biggest issue IMO is that engineers who work on projects like these inevitably get bored and move on, and then the company is stuck trying to add features, fix bugs and generally untangle the mess, all taking away time and resources from their actual product.

[mattbillenstein]

Yeah, but you can always make this argument and build nothing - dealing with all the problems of every 3rd party SaaS / PaaS under the sun. Sometimes it's much easier to just build the thing and then you know where its' limitations are and you can address them over time.

[TZubiri]

>Perhaps, I'm not aware of the pricing in the Indian market

It's approximately 4 annual salaries (non dev)

[snovv_crash]

High per-unit costs lock you into certain workflows, and a lot of systems have much higher value at much larger scale.

For example, think of the value generated from a fraud detection system that alerts you on a nightly batch job, vs. a fraud detection system that runs once per minute. If you're spending $20k/y on the batch job, you're never even going to consider the 1/min option. If you can decost sufficiently to run it 1/min, whole new market opportunities open up.

[naijaboiler]

Even having 1 engineer working on this for only 1 month in one year it’s still cost ineffective.