They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They’d rather have no money than not charge per user it’s actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn’t cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can’t wait until their funding runs out.
All of the SaaS I looked at would not be a situation where the end employee would generate tickets. Only I as the owner would and even then the software is kind of set it and forget it for my use case which I made clear to the salesman. Many of them to their credit did kick it up the management chain to get a different quote. Only 1 company out of four or five went for it.
The problem I’ve run into is SaaS companies typically white collar companies who are used to paying per seat where employees generally make 6 figures, where as my blue collar company is full of dozens of part time employees where the per seat model breaks down.
Yah me too, for my small company per seat pricing is really painful. For some services we just have one account and share access; only one person logs in at a time and tells everyone else when they’re done.
The Salesperson is incredibly important. They take the person responsible for making the purchase decision out to lunch and for rounds of golf, after all!
Hmm really? Would proficiency with Terraform and knowledge of the services offered by at least one major cloud provider be considered “cloud server orchestration skills” or do you mean something more/different?
Yep! My best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 organizations currently has any in-house orchestration skills on staff at all.
(I’m just annecdotaly guessing based on my professional network, which is actually heavily biased towards organizations that have orchestration skills, but also based on job offers that my peers with orchestration skills are seeing.)
And the ones that have it get to charge a premium for shitty cloud services to the ones that do not.
That’s pretty crazy, good to know. We had a hard time hiring a “cloud engineer” last year ourselves, though for the client in question we were looking for deep Azure chops. I’ve been learning some Terraform for this reason so we can respond a bit better, sounds like I might be well served to focus on it. Feel like DM’ing with salaries / offers you’ve been hearing about, if you have?
Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.
When I’m looking for a new tool, I don’t have the time to schedule a “quick” 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it’s ever going to happen!
I’m not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don’t have that kind of time to waste!
Sometimes. Sometimes whatever executive demanded we use this doesn’t want to hear about it and will throw you under the bus because otherwise it would be their fault.
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you’ve ever used.
They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They’d rather have no money than not charge per user it’s actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn’t cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can’t wait until their funding runs out.
Per user licensing is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of per cpu licensing.
Per core licensing walks into the room.
Hello?
I don’t miss doing Microsoft license audits.
Such shit really exists?
Oracle has entered the chat
Enterprise Linux distros, enterprise (Oracle-owned) database management systems, etc.
Unfortunately, at work we use a bunch of Finite element modelling software and all of them have that type of licence.
What the actual fuck?
IBM’s IBMi products make you pay yearly to activate the cores.
It’s often per user, because the amount of support tickets usually scales with the amount of users.
All of the SaaS I looked at would not be a situation where the end employee would generate tickets. Only I as the owner would and even then the software is kind of set it and forget it for my use case which I made clear to the salesman. Many of them to their credit did kick it up the management chain to get a different quote. Only 1 company out of four or five went for it.
The problem I’ve run into is SaaS companies typically white collar companies who are used to paying per seat where employees generally make 6 figures, where as my blue collar company is full of dozens of part time employees where the per seat model breaks down.
Yah me too, for my small company per seat pricing is really painful. For some services we just have one account and share access; only one person logs in at a time and tells everyone else when they’re done.
Oof. Yes!
The proprietary cloud crap usually has worse or non-existent documentation, fewer features, and a terrible or non-existent API.
But it comes with a salesperson. So there’s that.
But people with cloud server orchestration skills are terrifyingly expensive right now, so self-hosting a better product can be a very hard sell.
The Salesperson is incredibly important. They take the person responsible for making the purchase decision out to lunch and for rounds of golf, after all!
Hmm really? Would proficiency with Terraform and knowledge of the services offered by at least one major cloud provider be considered “cloud server orchestration skills” or do you mean something more/different?
Yep! My best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 organizations currently has any in-house orchestration skills on staff at all.
(I’m just annecdotaly guessing based on my professional network, which is actually heavily biased towards organizations that have orchestration skills, but also based on job offers that my peers with orchestration skills are seeing.)
And the ones that have it get to charge a premium for shitty cloud services to the ones that do not.
That’s pretty crazy, good to know. We had a hard time hiring a “cloud engineer” last year ourselves, though for the client in question we were looking for deep Azure chops. I’ve been learning some Terraform for this reason so we can respond a bit better, sounds like I might be well served to focus on it. Feel like DM’ing with salaries / offers you’ve been hearing about, if you have?
Sometimes the value add is security, sometimes scaling or uptime. Enterprise considerations aren’t necessarily the same as for individual consumers.
Sometimes it’s just a dogshit product though, and the sales team pulled the wool over some execs eyes.
Bahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah
In this case it’s not “security”, it’s offloading the responsibility of security to a 3rd party.
If the enterprise app leaks data, they’re the ones responsible. Not you, the IT guy who chose it
Enterprise software/services/consulting in a nutshell. It’s all just shifting responsibility.
Precisely
Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.
When I’m looking for a new tool, I don’t have the time to schedule a “quick” 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it’s ever going to happen!
I’m not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don’t have that kind of time to waste!
In a lot of cases, you only see the final price after signing up.
You pay for the support.
And the support sucks.
At least you can shift the blame.
Sometimes. Sometimes whatever executive demanded we use this doesn’t want to hear about it and will throw you under the bus because otherwise it would be their fault.
You wouldn’t need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.
You understand the model, good job!!!