News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by joshuaellinger on Sunday August 10, 2014 @09:35AM (#8159671)
Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech.

But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where you get x3 productivity or x3 better ability to hire.

Also, I think you are asking the wrong question. The problem you are trying to solve drives the platform decision and language (even DB) are only a small part of the equation. Amazon works just fine with C#/.Net and it is cheap to free at first. To get a fair comparison at scale, you need to include the price of EC2 instances against a dedicated self-hosted database server. Depending on your application, you'll get very different answers.

In your shoes (based on limited info), I would try to get into the BizSpark Cloud program. It is free MS software plus a big credit on Azure for three years. Then count on the price war between Amazon/Google/Azure to keep prices in line.

Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by frostmatthew on Sunday August 10, 2014 @09:44AM (#8159689)
> +10% productivity covers the tools

That's a bold claim to say using MS Dev tools are sure to increase productivity by 10%. Have anything to back that up? [e.g. studies, not your opinion or anecdotes].

And +10% productivity compared to what? Using C#/.Net without MS tools? Or compared to using a different stack (which seemed to be the OP's question)?

Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by germano on Sunday August 10, 2014 @08:07PM (#8161266)
I'd say the assertion was under the assumption that the devs in question know the .Net stack well enough to gain at least a 10% productivity gain over using a stack they are less familiar with.
Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by JoeAltmaier on Sunday August 10, 2014 @10:09AM (#8159743)
Still salary is paid out over time. Tools cost up-front. In a lean startup that could sink you?
Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by bnjs on Thursday August 14, 2014 @03:52PM (#8179487)
Re:Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors? by plorkyeran on Sunday August 10, 2014 @11:33PM (#8161813)
The tools are free for a few years via BizSpark. A lot of companies find the bill at the end of the BizSpark period pretty painful, but you should usually at least be out of lean startup mode by then.