alt Hacker NewsThe minimum viable unit of saleable software
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I feel like the build threshold discussed is _extremely_ optimistic?
> But does that always hold true? Let’s take the other side for a second by examining a much higher-priced SaaS product. Gemini reports that the price of a fully loaded Salesforce seat is ~$500/mo. Say you need 50 seats, that’s $25k/mo!
> For that price you could have 1.5x engineering resources (25 / 16.7) working on your clone full time. Once again, a CRM’s a reasonably complex piece of software and a rebuild wouldn’t be trivial, but no matter how you construe it, this is closer to a “build” decision, even for a smaller company. (And with Salesforce down 30% YTD, the markets seem to believe it too.)
If $25k for salesforce is too much, my view is that your first thought should be to look for a cheaper competitor, not build a thing?
Ok, you vibed your own. Great! Now you need custom integrations for everything, you can't hire out of the market, you have to re-train everyone and all new starters, you have an extra thing to HA, monitor, back up etc. People can't google for answers about it anymore. This is before we can talk about what it actually costs in terms of bikeshedding, roadmap creation, project management, product management etc etc. Plus compliance, security, your org policies and relevant regulations if you're storing personal information. Think of how many meetings it would take to get this done, the political costs, and how much it costs to get consensus in big companies.
There is also RISK. Nobody is gonna get fired for choosing SalesForce, but there are many different angles by which building an in-house solution for something considered commodity (tho an expensive one) can go horribly wrong.
The more subtle cost is _brain space_. Human engineers have context limits too; switching projects has costs, and you can't put ONE engineer on the thing and expect it to be sustainable. You need about a minimum of four people to understand anything you expect to maintain and operate long term.
Your org's capacity for engineering focus is precious and IMHO you should try really hard not to use it on non-core stuff unless you have to.
I like that you point out that the cost to build software is still not 0. And in my expirence it’s further from 0 than I would expect. I often find myself thinking I can rebuild a project (or usually improve upon an existing one) in just a few days. And yet when it comes down to making anything well, it still takes time and iteration.
It’s a bit funny because I felt this way before coding agents as well, like you could clone something in just a few weeks. But in practice my expectations are rarely accurate.
“Build vs buy” assumes that there are only two parties. If it’s easier to build internally, then it’s easier for a 3rd party competitor to enter the market and bid the price down. I think the "zone of viability" is real, it just narrows and shifts downward.
The author hints at this in a footnote: > It does, however, pencil out to use a different product instead. In this particular case, it’s easy: use Linear instead of Jira.
I wouldn't underestimate the community effect of software. There are plenty of features that get shipped because a small but important minority requested them, only to benefit the long tail of users who never knew to ask for such a feature but now find it indispensable. If everyone is building their own isolated solutions, how does this positive externality manifest itself?
As someone who built a niche SaaS I can see both sides of this.
If you are looking to replicate the exact same feature set of an existing product - buying would almost always be a better choice.
But it's rare for avg customer needs to perfectly match product features. Most often they need 20-40% of the product + some custom, business specific logic that's missing and is later fixed with spreadsheets/integrations. In that case it depends on how mission critical this software is.
I'd say investing into the core software that runs your business might very well be worth the effort, even if it's 10x between build vs buy.
This is quite an interesting one to me because dotnet has a couple of job queues, with hangfire (hangfire.io) probably being the main one. I've used hangfire for years and it's OK, but it was lacking a few critical features for the current project I'm working on. I've tried extending hangfire before and it's quite unpleasant to work with, so I decided to go down the LLM build route https://github.com/hackf5/sheddueller. It took about a week to build the service that did everything I need. The code is good enough and it was definitely the right choice. The real benefit is that I can add any features that I need and make it work in harmony with the main project.
> One user there posted about how his company had been spending $400/mo on Atlassian’s Jira. He’d felt personally slighted by this outrageous bill, so he’d had his team build a new internal task tracker using Claude.
I dislike Jira as much as anyone but these anecdotes are far removed from what I've experienced. Opus 4.8 continues to trip itself up over trivialities that go beyond one-shotting a most basic CRUD app, let alone implementing something complex you yourself don't understand.
> Are you crazy?! Anything you ship can be instantly displaced by an internal package built by an LLM!
That's funny, the first thing every LLM I use generally does is install a bunch of third party packages...
Actually the math is worse.
Every new line increases dramatically the complexity of the software which requires more cost and most maintenance. If you stop at a single tool this is still manageable.
Imagine now that you do the same for 10 other products - all critical systems. You will end up running the tools to save on imaginary money. Even then, software vendors can simply undercut and offer the software cheaper because they use agents too.
So building everything in-house is not the right way to go unless you have no other option - which was always the case pre coding assistants.
If you ask engineers of course they will say yes. It is yet another nice toy project and interesting challenge. But decision makers need to learn to say no - more often they used to.
I think this is a well thought out understanding of your specific snapshot in time. However these are indeed exponential times. It may be more realistic to do your calculus on time shifting assumptions, especially given how clear you are about the development time and life cycle of the product.
> the internet’s most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn
Great quote!
Truly agree with the framing of buy vs build.
Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.
Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out of their own wallet, turning up their noses at anything that isn't offered open source and completely free. Enterprises manage to saddle what should be a no-brainer trivial expense into dozens of hours of bureaucracy that cost two orders of magnitude more than the expense the bureaucracy is for.
Your customers are more irrational than you are, and your appeal to them will likely need to resonate with them on an emotional level rather than logical one. I would argue that marketing is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, by far.
I feel like my HN comments fall now into 3 categories :
- free software exists since the 80s, having software that costs literally 0, not even being "very cheap" is NOT new
- Goodhart's law where we get a new KPI only to make the entire process and ecosystem around it pointless
- the rest (but it's rare)
so... yeah this one is option #1.
Brandur of course knows more than me, and his framing sounds correct. I would be worried about whether the TAM of Go + Postgres is enough for business sustainability, but that says probably more about my fears than the reality in this huge market called “internet”
I get this a lot. Yeah, you can have an LLM copy what I've built, no it's not going to be as good unless you also spend the equivalent of the amount of hours I've spent on it.
I am forced to use jira soon as I was using BB issues and that is expiring soon.
So I'll build something simple for us, that integrates with our systems and how we like to do things.
It won't cost us much since our meagre requirements are nothing comparted to a full fledged Jira replacement.
Without LLMs it would have taken maybe a couple of days effort and perhaps an hour a month to fix any bugs we miss or add an extra overlooked feature.
With LLMs ... we shall see.
We won't set out to solve all of the world's issue tracking problems, so that will save a lot of time.
KISS is the goal.
I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it.
It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.
It knew.
One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.
With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.
You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.
These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.
A few months ago I had a conversation with a friend who runs a small company doing about $10M/year. He was thrilled about being able to drop his $40K/year Salesforce expense. One of his employees, let's call him Joe, a customer service person with some coding experience, used AI to create a CRM for the company that addressed most, if not all, of their needs.
He, the CEO, saw this as saving $40K per year. Until I asked simple questions:
What happens when Joe leaves?
When he goes on vacation?
If he has a health emergency?
The LLM isn't going to magically maintain the software, evolve, fix or support it.
What are you going to do?
The obvious conclusion was that he likely had to hire another person to work with Joe on this in-house CRM and, at a minimum, have redundant project ownership. Backup for development, maintenance and support.
The easy conclusion was: This will save him $40K a year until he decides to hire another person, at which point this "free" software will cost him $150K per year, $110K/year more than what he was paying Salesforce. If he does not hire a second person to work in the internal CRM, he might get lucky and things could be fine for a few years or he will have to face a crisis at some point when Joe is no longer around and nobody knows the first thing about his mini-CRM, not even the LLM.
I wonder how many people are falling for this trap these days. The allure of zero-cost software vs. the reality of introducing risk, technical debt and organizational risk.
To be sure, we are using LLM's extensively. However, until this is better understood, in the realm of software development it is constrained to what I would call "advanced auto complete" at the file level rather than anything resembling project-wide work. When we do write full applications, they are often relatively trivial internal tools that a person could complete in not much more than one week. In other words, easy to understand and code if another engineer had to jump in and none of these utilities are mission critical.
Not a SalesForce dev, but there is a bit of oversimplification what CRM SaaS is today.
Almost everything integrates with SF today and most often understanding, replicating and maintaining these integration pathways may need more than 1.5 engineers. You then bring 3 engineers (to cover absences) and buy enough tokens.
And we haven't even scratched other parts: disaster recovery, security, legal (CCPA/GDPR), etc
There's another dimension to the Salesforce CRM "build" argument; which is to reduce your 25 seats down to 5, and expend Eng resources to building "agents" to automate many recurring data-entry CRM tasks.
This is also the reason the stock has hit a 3-year low. Not because CRM can be replaced entirely. But because the seat count can be reduced 50%+.
Corporations will be quite happy with really simple features if they're packaged right. I'm selling software that mostly does things that a good programmer could whip up in a couple of days or weeks, but what cost me most of the development time wasn't the features but all the FUD around them e.g. SSO, multitenancy, audit logs, corporate design support, ... Most enterprise software could be replaced with simple scripts and command line tools if they had this enterprise layer. I'd wager tons of SaaS is just simple open-source software and libraries behind a management layer.
Something to bear in mind when planning to attack a market where the existing vendor charges a high price (Salesforce in this example) -- they can reduce their price in the future.
I find that younger software engineers sometimes take the attitude of: Why would I pay for that when I could easily just do it on my own? As they grow and gain more responsibilities that flips to: Why would I build and maintain something on my own when I could pay someone else a few bucks to do it? At least I feel I went through this change as I grew professionally...
So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things.
Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!
1.) your site looks gorgeous 2.) so does the Bulgarian scene from the top, added it to my list 3.) excellent thinking, I'm wishing you good luck
Good luck on your new endeavour! Selling to devs is hard, did you consider building in public? That would def help get traction imo. Your point about considering API design and overall architecture would definitely differentiate among the all AI slop out there
Not everyone is a 200k engineer. Even kids with some hacker skills or university students with time > salary, who have access to LLM's, will start making cheaper alternatives and get into business that way for themselves.
In business you should focus more on how much you can make than on how much you can save.
If you are lucky to have talented staff on your payroll, they should put their hard work into things which increase business revenue and profit, not things which reduce expenses. Unless there's an expense which is outrageous.
If that engineer in the article example can build a Salesforce clone, then he can instead build more valuable software which the business can sell for a profit. It could be a Salesforce clone even.
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I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build.
I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get.
In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain is still the practical option compared to the motivation and effort needed to maintain another dependency.