Comment by avar
8 years ago
Just some honest feedback on your pricing that's hopefully helpful: Your Enterprise plan is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than what many organizations would pay for something like this.
E.g. a Jira license for 2000 people costs $24,000 yearly[1], licensing this for the same amount of users would be $1,200,000.
This is way more than organizations of that size tend to pay for top-tier support contracts for software that's critical to business continuity.
Pricing per-user without any advertised discounts is also a trap if you're selling to large organizations. A lot of them tend to, for simplicity's sake, want to just give everyone in the org access to a tool like this, but only 5-10% of the workforce might be using it, but due to how you're pricing it there's no way it's going to be bought in the first place.
Granted, Jira ends up costing way more than $24,000 yearly, because all plugins need to be purchased for all users, and Jira tends to require employing at least one full-time admin. All-told, it's more in line with a few hundred thousand dollars yearly.
With that said, $1.2 million for 2,000 users yearly for a code-search tool is some pretty insane Kool-Aid pricing, and it prevents me from even recommending it to my bosses - I'd be laughed out of the room.
A JIRA installation with 2,000 users probably has many fewer developers, and you'd only pay for Sourcegraph for developers. For customers where this makes a big difference, we work with them on the pricing.
But if you're a large company with 2,000 engineers, then you could be spending nearly a half-billion dollars on engineering salaries alone. If Sourcegraph makes your developers at least 0.5% more productive, then it pays for itself.
And shouldn't companies be spending 5-10% of their salary budget on getting the best tools? (That would mean tens of millions of dollars annually for this hypothetical 2,000-person company.) Companies routinely pay that for people in other roles, such as salespeople, medical professionals, stock/bond traders, etc. I think we all agree developers deserve the same. :)
> you could be spending nearly a half-billion dollars on engineering salaries alone. If Sourcegraph makes your developers at least 0.5% more productive, then it pays for itself.
A couple things:
a) $500 million / 2,000 engineers is $250,000 per engineer. Even if you take benefits and equipment / licensing costs into consideration, that's really high. Most enterprises aren't located in Silicon Valley and don't pay Silicon Valley engineering salaries.
b) I don't doubt your 0.5% figure, and the argument about the best tools money can buy goes all the way back to the Joel Test, but engineers aren't the ones who make the decision whether to buy these tools, the enterprise bean counters do. Do you have any evidence, even anecdotal evidence, to back up your 0.5% number? Because otherwise, the bean counters just see yet another toy that engineering wants to put on the budget, and the budget is always too restricted to add toys to the budget. Remember how long it took most enterprises to understand that multiple monitors aided productivity? And that's practically obvious. Why does Sourcegraph get a pass? What kind of concrete evidence can engineers pass along to their bean counters to justify the cost of Sourcegraph's licenses?
edit: I want to add, Sourcegraph isn't going to be paid only for engineers. It'll also be paid for QA, engineering management, infrastructure/ops... eventually, everyone wants to store something in version control.
Maybe what you're saying is true, but that simply isn't the reality we live in. JIRA is a great comparison point as it produces a lot of value for a team. Do you really think your tool provides 10x more value than JIRA for a team? Would you recommend a team buy your system over a quality issue tracker if they don't have one?