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by cherry_tree 70 days ago
Do you think the cost of evaluating replacements, agreeing on one, and switching all people and processes to this new tool would cost this startup more or less than 600$ this year? After how many years would that work break even at 600$/year?

I swag this work to take:

1 engineer 8 hours to honestly evaluate alternatives, their licenses, the likelihood they will move towards a similar model in the next ~3 years, number of stars on GitHub, etc

2+ engineers 2 hours to agree on the path forward

1 engineer 2 hours to implement to new solution

8 engineers 1 hour to switch to the new solution

1 engineer 1 hour to finalize the removal of the old solution

I’ll call it 24 hours of work total, how much are you paying your engineers? Let’s say an easy 100$/hr. At this rate, it would cost $2400 and take 4 years to break even on doing this work (assuming the new solution has feature parity at the old 12$/month rate)

If I was tailscale doing this math, I would bet your startup is not gunna do this work to migrate away from tailscale right now because of this price increase.