assume a dev is $100k/year... so $200k with taxes, benes, etc. That's 16,666/month, at 1.5 months is 25k. So it'll take 3.5 months to break even. And they'd save around .8 of their pay, or .4 of their total cost a year...
Generally I am hoping my devs are working a good multiplier to their pay for revenue they generate. Not sure I'd use them this way if there was other things to do.
Where are you finding capable DevOps engineers for 100k total comp? It’s hard to find someone with the skills to rebuild a SaaS production stack who’s willing to work for that little around here!
I'm picking a random salary that's not too high that lower comp countries/industries will reject, and not too low that higher comp countries / industries will reject, and then doing math on those.
You can then take my numbers or math and plug in YOUR comp rates. But the TL;DR I've seen is many people never even do napkin math like this on ROI.
Now consider that some places are not in Silly Valley, or not even in USA, and the fully loaded cost of engineer (who, once done with on-prem or at least more "owned" stack, can take on other problems) can be way, way lower
These numbers are actually WAY LOW for silicon valley. If I was doing the ROI for an Amazon employee I'd start with around 350 for an SDE all told for entry level and half a mill for one with a few years experience.
But they're also way high for other places. And just right.
The point is how to do the math not the ballpark. Also that even at 100k for a dev it's maybe a wash depending on your time horizon.
My experience is that a lot of "simpler alternatives" ballooned costs beyond cost of someone to wrangle the more complex solution - and well, after initial pains, the workload drops so you can have them tackle other problems if not at full time.
Or as I said it few times at meetups, Heroku is what I use when I want to go bankrupt (that was before Heroku got sold)
I mean, $7,000 a month isn’t nothing. But it’s not a lot. Certainly not enough to justify a seven month engineering effort plus infinite ongoing maintenance.
This is $7k/mo today. If they are actively growing, and their demand for compute is slated to grow 5x or even 10x in a year, they wanted to get off Heroku fast.
That “main engineering effort” will go on forever. People neglect to note that everything is constantly changing. Just like the roof on your house, if you don’t upgrade your components regularly, eventually you will face a huge rewrite when that thing your ancient home-made infrastructure relies on is no longer supported or is no longer updated to support the latest thing you need for your SaaS.
You can’t avoid this cost. Some people refer to it as technical debt, but I think more accurately it could be called “infrastructure debt”. Platform providers maintain the infrastructure debt for you - this is what you pay them for. And they do it with tremendous economies of scale. Unless your scale is truly enormous - like Meta, for instance - it isn’t worth build your own infrastructure.
