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Re:Running Costs of a SaaS app by jmduke on Monday February 20, 2017 @05:02PM (#13691392)
Automation isn't just a choice where you snap your fingers and it's done. Automation takes time and effort and adds technical debt and support burden; sometimes these are trivial amounts, sometimes they aren't.

I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python.

I know I could spend maybe two hours writing a replacement for it and set it on an EC2 host and probably never worry about it again, but those two hours are still non-trivial amounts of time: two hours of my time pays for more than three years of that $10/month. Plus, the API may be brittle, there may be edge cases I haven't thought about, and I don't want to add yet another thing to monitor and worry about.

Sometimes, yeah, you can automate things and roll your own dependencies -- and sometimes the calculus works out and it's a no-brainer. But I've found that homebrewing a $XX/mo dependency is rarely the best use of my engineering time.

Re:Running Costs of a SaaS app by codeisawesome on Monday February 20, 2017 @09:59PM (#13692896)
These are actually solid life advice for programmers: https://xkcd.com/1319/ & https://xkcd.com/1205/
Re:Running Costs of a SaaS app by iampims on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @01:54AM (#13693808)
> I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python.

Would you mind sharing which service that is?

Re:Running Costs of a SaaS app by jasonkester on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:11AM (#13694133)
I run S3stat, and that's a pretty fair description of the service we provide (for that price). It brings in a nice living from small businesses that can perform the basic arithmetic described above.
Re:Running Costs of a SaaS app by jmduke on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @10:19AM (#13696098)
Specifically I was referring to Briefmetrics:

briefmetrics.com

S3Stat (who another commenter mentioned) is also a great example.