Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> It takes money to make a robust solution, plus healthy profit, but that money is spread across every customer.

The requirements of supporting the more demanding customers typically are amortized across all customers. Requirements re: security, SLA (uptime, data durability, etc.), data governance for example. It is difficult to both implement and market products that break these dimensions into tiers. You can sometimes do it for the very niche, tail of your customers (air gap regions, for example), but in a lot of products, everyone is sharing in these costs even if they only care about a subset of the capabilities.

The cost savings of scale are offset by the costs of say, needing to support Fortune 100s that need 99.99% availability even if Bob's Wordpress Page doesn't care too much about 99% vs 99.99%. You can apply that analogy to every dimension.

A homegrown solution targets specifically what your company actually cares about. It makes sense that it may be cheaper.

But again. YOU are intelligent, you are informed, you can look and see that Datadog provides a bunch of capabilities you don't need and you're paying for things you don't get benefit from and make the trade-off of building your own. Just stop telling me about it.

Making an argument that there's something abnormal about market competition and that's why prices stay high is different -- I'd read that.



If their amortized support cost is an appreciable fraction of the 83k, I feel like something has gone wrong.

And if someone is demanding 99.99% SLA, that cost should not be passed on to customers that only want the normal 99.8% with no refunds.

> provides a bunch of capabilities you don't need and you're paying for things you don't get benefit from

Capabilities such as?

It sounds like you're making a generic defense that could be applied to companies that justify their costs and to companies that don't.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: