zlacker

I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got.

B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.

Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.

I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.

If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.

>>echelo+(OP)
> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.

>>fallou+O
Metrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data.

We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.

Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.

>>echelo+q2
What agents are you using? If you stick to opentelemetry and open source agents and develop a collector infrastructure - You can switch across different vendors with lower impact and ramp off time.

Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.

>>echelo+(OP)
If you’re working in engineering, find an exit. AI is coming for you.

>>echelo+(OP)
> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them

You get the same shocks with internal teams, just from other causes. And you have to manage them.

I'm sure you've only ever seen brilliant software created by internal software teams?