When at every turn you pick the priciest options, you see why I find it not realistic to claim companies pay what you think they would. Especially for sub-par open source things.

> GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month

Github has a $4/month pricing plan. The companies I deal with all use internal source control, paying zero to github.

>Slack is $150/user/yr for business,

Of the 4 corporate slack channels I am art of, only one is paid, using the 6.67/mo/user version, for $80/person/yr. So on average these 4 run $20/user/year.

Want more data? Here's [1] Stackoverflow 2020 developer report. Half report using Slack. If that are like my experience, then maybe 1 in 4 uses paying, and maybe that's the low tier. If that still holds, 1 in 8 devs from StackOverflow (which is a very select group) is paying for Slack.

>Salesforce

Wait, what? Are you claiming every dev needs Salesforce? I know precisely zero with it, and I run a decent amount of seminars across multiple companies. Are you a developer that uses Salesforce regularly? This makes no sense to me whatsoever.

And then you throw in some vague SaaS products, needing to get to 6 or 8? Go ahead and tell me which 6-6 Salesforce style SaaS things the average dev uses.... It will be interesting to see what you pick.

So sorry, it seems you're more than just making stuff up, picking the highest values at each choice, to try to justify the prices.

>It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning.

I work directly under the owner and VP of tech in one company, for which I've been doing so for almost two decades, and have known a decent amount of their their finances for a long time. I also have talked at length with the Pres, VP, and head of HR at the other company I regularly work with. I own a profitable company for over 15 years now. All of these are heavily software dev houses. I have a decent number of friends that own dev companies or are high enough up to know the answer to this, and I've regularly asked them how their internal cost structure breaks down, mostly to compare to mine and to refine my understanding of how company finances work. I'm pretty sure I have decent insight to how this works.

For the first I write the proposals to get new software in, I see the counts, I price options, for a large amount of the developers. I see the numbers there.

At the second, from talking to those who do exactly this, I am quite clear their rates and overhead is in line with what I expect from such companies. I could ask directly, but since I work with a lot of devs there and see the tooling, there's no need. $2k/dev/year is a ton of money.

At the third, since it's my company, I see every nickel. It's also no where $2k/dev/year. Buying hardware like 3d printers, laser cutters, PCs, etc., ups the per person spend, but even there it's amortized over people and time and still not likely 2k/person/year spend.

It sounds like I do have expertise in this area and you are missing it.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...