
Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost? - osel
https://isitworththecost.com/
======
projektfu
I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the analysis.

1\. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How
do I estimate the actual savings in time?

2\. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the
company’s advantage?

3\. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time required as
supervisor?

4\. From a financial point of view, I’m still paying the employee and the
service, so either I need enough services and time savings that I can
eliminate a job, or the service has to have positive ROI of its own.

And probably many more. I often receive proposals of this type, that I could
be “saving” so much by buying something. The money goes out up front, the
savings are supposed to trickle back in these hard to quantify and use ways.

~~~
dijit
> I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do
> I estimate the actual savings in time?

Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.

GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.

I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in
aggregate.

Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the
“search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a
service.

But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a
service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself.

> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the
> company’s advantage?

There’s two points to this argument;

1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me?

2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the
office 9hrs per day.

The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs
tend to only be around 40% productive.[0]

There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that
percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such
as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to
“needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an
outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is
evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not
lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase).

(I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone)

Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be
busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient!
Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that.
I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing
actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less.

You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each
time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and
certainly cause you to mentally check out.

[0]: [https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-
spend...](https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend-their-
time/)

~~~
lucideer
> _Sure you have, albeit by another name likely._

> _GitHub /Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week._

> _I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in
> aggregate._

> _Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the
> “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a
> service._

These are three highly subjective, very unconvincing statements. I use Github,
Gitlab, multiple slackbots (some I wrote, some others wrote), managed CI, and
a few search services internally in my company every day. I have no confidence
that any of them are timesavers in the way that you state.

Slackbots in particular have been shown to use more time than they save
(context switching is extremely costly). Github is a source-code host that ads
distracting social features, notification queues, etc. all which can add to an
employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more
basic code-host.

I'm not saying they _don 't_ save time in aggregate, but there's certainly
arguments on either side.

~~~
dijit
I know a company which I will not name, that was passing source-code around
with a USB drive.

Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB stick right now'.
And while this is an absurd and extreme example (and a true one, crucially)
you can't deny that github would have saved those developers countless hours.

Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage something on-site:
but that's why this topic (and the OP's site) is interesting, how do we
quantify it?

~~~
jonfw
You're supposed to compare a service against it's competition, not the least
productive thing you could possibly imagine in it's stead.

If you walked into a car dealership and the best thing they could say is "It's
WAY better than walking!"\- that wouldn't make a great pitch.

~~~
dijit
This is such a bad faith comment I don't know where to begin.

Of course no reasonable person is saying that you have to compare against the
worst thing, that's stupid- I was simply stating that I've seen things that
have easily quantifiable returns.

I'm comparing it against the 'nothing' that I would otherwise have.

If you're comparing something then that's yours to compare, and this is a tool
for doing that.

if you're not running github or gitlab, what are you running?

Maybe SVN+jira? or gogs? or gitea? what about teamcity?

I'm not going to break down the cost savings and expenses of each of those,
I'm just saying we're all already using services that have saved us many hours
a week compared to those services not existing in any form.

Its up to you to debate the 'many forms' a service takes, and remember that
server hosting and human time is not free, so something self-hosted that
requires some hours of time to maintain needs to be cost controlled for.

~~~
mattmanser
How is it bad faith? You're wrong, he's right.

You can run your own code repository, people did for decades, and took backups
home. These days you could just send one to A.N.Y.Other cloud service.

It doesn't take 5 hours per week, and if it takes 5 hours per year I'd be
surprised.

~~~
dijit
It’s bad faith because it speaks to the content of what I said and not the
point.

I am one of those people who managed code hosting repositories: but it’s
completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at
all, and to remove all of the other integrated features too? No. Absurd.

And anyway. The point was making is that we are already paying for services
that save us a lot of time- they are of incredible value, and thus universal.

And yes, you might not spend 5hrs a year on _just_ code hosting but code
hosting and web view and merge request portals and issue tracking and so on-
should those services not be provided somehow (or be provided by something
like jira/swarm etc); would easily cost more than that in time.

Hell, even running gitlab is an hour/w job just ensuring that backups are well
tested and CI machines are purged, running updates and so on.

It has a low cost, because it’s just one person doing it, but the overall
_point_ was that we already have some services that save us time and the
parent was not speaking about them.

~~~
lucideer
> _it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost
> involved at all_

Noone in this thread is arguing this.

Your original post made some statements about services saving time, as matter-
of-fact statements that are apparently self-evident. I replied saying that
these statements are not necessarily self-evident nor always true.

It's possible that Github saves you 5hrs a week. This doesn't mean you can say
that this is obvious and universal.

~~~
dijit
I’m not sure if you’re intentionally missing my point or if I’m ineffective at
communicating it.

I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they save
time, easily 5hrs a week- and creating them anew would cost more than those
services do if you buy them as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)

You can argue the minutia of “this service” vs “that service” but at the end
of the day those suite of things save time.

~~~
lucideer
I think I understand your point. And I disagree.

> _I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they
> save time_

Popular services are ubiquitous for many reasons, some of them based on actual
value, some of them based on perceived value, and others based on things
orthogonal to day-to-day value like organisational inertia, aspects of network
effects, etc. They may save time for you. Others may have chosen the service
for different reasons: either wise or ill-advised.

> _easily 5hrs a week_

Subjective. But also, more importantly, subject to error based on your
metrics. How have you quantified time saved by Github?

> _creating them anew would cost more than those services do if you buy them
> as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)_

This is, I think, where you're missing my point. Of course creating them anew
would cost more than those services do. That's not the question being asked
here though. What's being discussed is whether using Github will save you time
over not-using Github.

Not using Github does not necessarily mean maintaining an equivalent service
itself, because that presupposes that the features provided by Github save you
time as is. The only reason you would host an equivalent service yourself is
if they definitely do, which isn't a certainty.

~~~
dijit
This is..

.. satire?

What do you propose as an alternative to github/gitlab/code hosting?

I can break down reasons for github/gitlab as a service being aggressive
value, however I would be shot down with "but that's not reality, you should
compare competitors!" as it was in this comment chain... So I'd love for you
to pontificate on the point you're making.

~~~
cooliosis
Either pontificate doesn't mean what you think it means, or you're being an
asshole.

------
osel
A simple check on whether purchasing a service is worth the cost - built in an
afternoon in response to a previous HN discussion [1].

A few people expressed interest in embedding something similar in a landing
page, so I've open-sourced the code for others to use if they wish.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22497093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22497093)

~~~
glaberficken
Under "Service cost" it could use an option for "one time purchase fee".
Obviously that is going to create special cases for the "amortizations" output

~~~
osel
Cheers, a few people of suggested this. As you note, it rather depends on the
amortization period.

At the moment it assumes 1 year for training costs to be amortized over, so I
guess one-time purchase would be similar - configurable assumptions (or at
list, visibility into the assumptions) is on the list of things to do.

------
glenjamin
Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of having to
deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good SaaS alternative
exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance department"

~~~
glaberficken
I was going to say. The biggest cost for most organizations is the recruitment
and training costs of an employee that leaves due to demotivation stemming
from having to do "robotic" tasks.

~~~
afarrell
An employee who struggles with that is, by definition, no longer at the
organization. So, there is nobody who would tell a decision-maker about that
cost.

Another example:

Let's say Company Z has a mailing list with all 200 engineers on it. Folks
such as the CTO and senior leadership use it to announce important events, to
send out recordings of meetings. Let's also say that the company has their
alerting infrastructure set up so that whenever any service had an exception
(server or browser), it emails the stacktrace to this same list.

How does this affect people? There is a wide range:

* Group A: Is naturally unbothered by it. Their inbox is always full but it is no big deal.

* Group B: Finds it to be a minor annoyance.

* Group C: Is seriously frustrated by it, but they just filter all the emails to a folder and accept that they'll miss a bunch.

* Group D: Finds it actively difficult to not pay attention to this, especially because they've heard too many stories about Alert Fatigue. They feel bad about just ignoring all alerts, including the ones for services they maintain.

Group C is going to be less productive and less tapped-in to whats going on.
So they will be less influential at the company. Groups A and B are going to
be more visibly productive and successful. they will gain seniority and
influence. Any member of Group D who does not teach themselves to ignore the
alert emails will be so unproductive that they will be fired. They certainly
won't have any influence, especially if they keep bringing up niche issues
like emails when there are more important things to deal with.

Therefore, from the perspective of Company Z's decision-makers (members of
groups A and B), there is not really any cost to continuing to send email this
way.

For more commentary on this:
[https://danluu.com/wat/](https://danluu.com/wat/)

------
georgyo
This seems really flawed.

Let's plug in numbers. This says that if a service costs 125$/month/employee
and I have 1000 employees ($125000/month) I will save ~5 million a year.

However a service costing 1.5 million at such a company has other costs.

Namely that a product that costs that much almost always needs an in house
support team. I have never seen the case where an expensive product also
didn't need 2-3 people in just to maintain and support it. But the employee
time savings is still worth it.

The next cost is much harder. In the tool we said this will save everyone 1
hour a day. However saving people time is not normally what a tool actually
does. PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends
alerts. Alerts that come from another tool that must be set up. At
40/person/month for 1000 people, that is 40,000 a month for zero "saved time."
The value of pagerduty for very different.

But anyone who has been in the field has seen, that list hidden cost is that a
paid service isn't normally a perfect fit. It is missing something, or your
particular use case doesn't map cleanly. You then have an army of people
working around the tool, saving negative time. The business might have reasons
to still use that tool. But saving time is not one of them.

So seeing this tool tell me that a service which cost $2,000,000 a year is
going to save me $5,000,000 feels like naive marketing nonsense. And it isn't
even marketing a product.

~~~
irjustin
This complaint seems really flawed.

> PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts.

Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally the time save.
The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the same way as any other tool.

Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest amount?

That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups who make this
decision very regularly. It's got 5 question boxes - of course, there's no way
it's going to cover an enterprise consideration that needs 3 analysts to
decide whether buying that SAP module is really worth $3mm/year.

Someone made a free tool and you're complaining about it as if it shouldn't
exist. Very unsupportive.

Downvoted.

~~~
georgyo
Perhaps I was overly grumpy. But I get pulled into these discussions a lot.
The company now has a very strong newly (2 years) developed "buy not build"
mentality.

Half the products we have bought have had full internal teams to support. And
many don't suite our needs, so we have enitre development teams building
abstractions that are more complex than the product we bought so we can use
the product we bought. And some of those abstractions have been in development
for 2 years so no one can use the product yet.

My only point is that buying vs building is complex. When you boil that down
to a tool that essentially says always buy, it causes a bit of PTSD for me.

~~~
rightbyte
I see this alot too. Products that are forced from above and not used, used
under gun point etc. Also products that kinda don't fit in and where it would
be just better to build it in house since the subset of functionaliy that is
needed is quite small, and so on.

------
redwood
What's this type of calculator often misses is how nuanced and complex is to
estimate the cost of employee time.

It's not just the cost of an employee salary per hour... Is the opportunity
cost of everything that employee could have instead done.

After all it isn't as though with more money you can just immediately get more
fully ramped sophisticated employees to add value... All of that is complex.

~~~
bluGill
There is also the cost of not understanding details that you left to someone
else. If you save time but no longer know what is happening you can get into
big trouble when those details matter.

~~~
femto
And the related, more general, risk of an additional external dependency: what
happens if the service disappears, changes or goes wrong?

------
Flimm
This looks really cool. I put in some numbers for a service that I am
considering, and the answer was the opposite of what I was intuitively
expecting, which proves the need for something like this.

Some feedback:

\- s/(one person)/(per person)/g \- The "cover costs" section doesn't really
make sense to me. For example, in one example, the breakdown says that I will
burn $10000 extra, but that I will also cover costs with 23 hours of use. How
does it know how much use it will take to cover costs? How does it know how
much profit is generated per hour of use? Am I misunderstanding something? \-
It would be nice if the formula used was displayed in small text or in a
tooltip or something.

~~~
marcosdumay
What I got after messing with it a bit:

The "cover costs" assumes your people will use the tool 8 hours a day. By the
productivity you gain, it calculates how much you save in salary.

The "free up an hour" also assumes your people will use the tools 8 hours a
day.

The "cover costs with" calculates how much your people must use the tool for
it to eventually pay for itself. If it's larger than 8 hours, then the tool
will never pay up.

------
drapery
Okay I really like the idea. I think the bottom line whether the SaaS is worth
the cost with the premise is that the SaaS saves time. However, time saving
(item 4) is pretty difficult to gauge. Therefore, I suggest having a version
where time saving is the output.

So then the question become, I have to believe that this SaaS will save XXXmin
per employee for me to consider buying it.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Good work OP. Any plans to add more variables in the future? e.g. Cost of
current equivalent service being used.

P.S. I've added your calculator to my curated list of startup tools[1].

[1][https://startuptoolchain.com/#operations](https://startuptoolchain.com/#operations)

------
KerryJones
This is looks like a different approach to a tool I also tried to address to
answer 'how much time should you invest in training'
[https://kerryjones.github.io/sharpen-the-
saw/](https://kerryjones.github.io/sharpen-the-saw/)

Had a whole article that went into this: [https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-
much-time-should-you-inves...](https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-much-time-
should-you-invest-in-training-db4fe5159ca7)

I like the idea and it's certainly more detailed than mine, but I think some
explanation of how this should be used and context is important.

------
drapery
I think a lot of users are missing the point. I don't see this tool as a final
decision maker and it can never be one. The final decision has a lot of
nuisances to that it is difficult to capture in one tool, so might as well
just open a spreadsheet and bang it out.

I see this tool as a quick a simple way to eliminate all the tools that might
look shiny and slick or save a few clicks, but doesn't actually save
employee's time at all.

So the decision becomes, I like the way this new SaaS feels or looks than our
current one, but is it really worth the additional cost?

~~~
osel
Exactly, and scale is important too. The initial target audience was small (as
in very small, maybe 1-10 people) businesses, whose owners often don't
intuitively understand how beneficial small services costs can be.

------
_pdp_
I like the idea.

In 99% of the cases, I rather buy the service than develop it from scratch and
support it long-term. Most consumer-facing services I've seen are relatively
cheap. I only tend to develop existing things if I find there are some
functionalities which either I cannot buy directly or they require a special
setup that does not go well with security and other constraints.

------
lukasm
This is look at the cost, but what about value? Say, the total cost per hour
(salary, insurance, benefits) is 50$, but how mych value does he/she create?

I used to do this calculation with 2x assumption. Say, a new IDE plugin saves
100 engineering hours, so it's 50 000 in cost and another 50 000, because they
spend time creating features.

Is it a good assumption?

------
saadalem
This but for E-commerce will be huge ! It would be cool to calculate a
product’s overall cost through its life span.

------
ponker
The two biggest line items are not easily measured and thus not included: The
removal of an external dependency that you don't control and may not evolve
with your needs, and the loss of the continuous improvement in that dependency
without continuous investment from you.

------
adibalcan
Can I save the parameters in URL in order to send at our customers?

~~~
osel
Not yet, it is on the list of features to implement.

------
osel
Hey all, thanks for the great feedback!

I submitted this just before retiring for the evening NZ time thinking not
much of it, it was awesome to find this discussion this morning!

------
AQXt
Feature request:

Add "One-time payment" option to the cost of the service.

This could be used to decide if you allocate resources to implement a new
feature in an internal system.

------
pseingatl
Saving money doesn't put cash in your pocket. It will help keep the cash you
have there, but is nothing but another cost item.

------
dzonga
but there's a hidden cost, that's never spoken of. cost of forgotten knowledge
or expertise. say you use AWS RDS | Aurora, on paper it's cheap. AWS runs
everything for you. what happens, when one day you need the knowledge to run
your own db ? or migrate to something different altogether ?

------
pagade
First thing that came into mind:

Is It Worth the Time? [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

~~~
andersource
The comic is actually referred to in the "about" section (question mark)

------
aisofteng
What about the cost of operating an equivalent service in house?

~~~
unixfg
If you're honestly appraising costs, the same evaluation would apply to on-
prem as well. 3-year refreshes, software updates, support, power, bandwidth,
etc

------
alecco
Missing: gains in time to market.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Good tool, but, as someone mentioned, there are a number of other factors.

1) Brand reinforcement/damage.

This one is really hard to quantify, but can mean the difference between the
life, or the death, of the corporation. If the tool we choose causes some
damage to the brand (like not giving us the ability to display the brand in an
appropriate manner), or introduces a brand-damaging problem (like causing a
particular kind of service to have an extra step or two, or even amplify
customer pain), then there could be issues.

On the plus side, it could also significantly fortify a brand, by doing things
like having the brand appear in places that were disregarded, or considered
"out of reach," or it could amplify the advantages of a brand-connected
service.

Branding is a "dark art" to many literal-minded folks like engineers, but it
is unbelievably valuable. It should always be considered, when thinking about
things like this.

This morning, I had this demonstrated to me in a visceral manner. I made an
order yesterday, and asked for expedited delivery. When I made the order, it
said the expedited delivery would arrive today, but when I received the
confirmation, it said the order would arrive tomorrow.

Sound familiar? Amazon is notorious for this nasty little trick. Most of the
time, it's Prime Delivery, which means we don't really have much room to
complain.

It wasn't Amazon. I won't name the corporation, but it is one that is
synonymous with extremely high (arrogant, even) quality.

This silly little trick, with a cheap, third-party item, caused brand damage
with a loyal customer that has spent six figures with them. I won't drop them,
and the world won't stop turning because I won't get my item until tomorrow,
but the simple fact that they did the "shipping bait and switch" on me, means
that I'll never use them again for this kind of purchase.

That's brand damage.

To add insult to injury, when I tried contacting them about it, I had to run
the gauntlet of what I call the "AI Picador," which throws as many roadblocks
as possible in your path, before allowing connection to a human.

This workflow ensures that I will be steaming mad before I get to the human,
and it's all I can do to avoid venting to them (it isn't their fault -it's
their bosses').

2) Staff morale.

Will bringing in the service reinforce or damage staff morale? It may help
folks do their jobs a lot easier (good), or it may result in a lot of folks
losing their jobs (bad, or _very_ bad, depending on many factors, like how the
layoffs are done, and how the folks that remain are treated).

3) Dependence/Addiction

If bringing in a dependency ties us to a corporation/language/toolset, is that
good or bad? It may be quite good, if it's a good service, and a good
corporation, but it could also be incredibly bad.

~~~
notahacker
If you're big enough for your brand image to be damaged by your bug reporting
tool, customer analytics or payment flow having a third party logo, you're
probably more in the realms of paying for the enterprise grade white labelling
offering than 'are ten seats worth the money' anyway. Of course you can
definitely wreck your sales with spammy use of email automation tools or
evasive customer service, but that's more to do with how tools are used than
the third party involvement.

And if SaaS is valuable enough to actually replace staff you've outgrown the
simple decision making aid too, although I agree that you can dent morale at
the margin by introducing SaaS oriented towards micromanagement or somewhat
improve it with less crappy processes even with the simplest of software
changes.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
For smaller organizations, the "plus" could outweigh the "minus."

For example, if the "beancounter" calculation says that the SaaS tool is "not
worth it," but bringing it in might significantly project the brand, then it
may be worth it, in a big way.

Same with advertising, but advertising is a bit easier to measure (after the
fact, as opposed to before). Brand value is really difficult to measure in any
kind of empirical manner.

But a bug reporting tool, if exposed to customers, is a _very_ important
branding surface.

Error handling/reporting is a _huge_ deal that is often neglected by tech
folks. For many of us, a console print or log entry may be quite sufficient,
but for an end user, they may need a lot more HI.

I've encountered some ghastly bug reporting tools that were obviously designed
by techs, for techs.

------
tunesmith
ha, awesome! I've had this idea so many times from the xkcd comic (which I see
was inspiration). I'm glad someone actually built a tool for it. It could be a
fun learning project for a simple mobile app too.

------
thatoneuser
This is great! Walking through the numbers mentally kinda works, but it seems
people are always suspicious they're being had. Seeing it live will be very
reassuring.

