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0 pointsgrepLeigh3y ago0 comments

I'd be curious to hear about services/tools developers do pay for. The diagnosis that developers do not pay for tools seems off to me.

A few tools that I put on the company card when I worked at a Big Tech Co as an IC:

* DataGrip (Jet brains)

* Colab Pro (Google)

* Postman Pro

These were all small $ enough where I didn't need to justify the expense. It was just assumed that if I thought the tool was worth the $, it was.

For more expensive purchasing decisions, there was a longer purchasing/approval process. But the expense would have to be 5-6 figures per year before hitting this barrier.

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jacurtis3y ago

Yeah I called BS when I read that line too. I pay for plenty of dev tools. Similar list to you.

* JetBrains (PyCharm professional, DataGrip, and Goland) ~$250/yr

* Lucidchart (Diagramming) ~100 /yr

* Paw (HTTP Client) ~$50 /yr

* Docker Pro ~$60 /yr

I think there's probably more, but I'm not at my work laptop to look, but those are the big ones. Those are only individual subscriptions. There's also huge costs when associated with things like Gitlab Premium ($20 - $100 /user/month), CI/CD, Code coverage tools, security scanners, etc. Companies pay A LOT for development tools.

If Kite thinks that the problem why no one will pay $9/mo for their service is because developers or their company's are cheap, they need to re-assess. The reason they couldn't sell their service is because it wasn't providing enough value to justify it. But companies are paying hundreds of dollars a month per developer in most cases for various tools. The extra $9 for Kite isn't the dealbreaker if there was enough value from it.

sanjayio3y ago

I think “company card” is the differentiating point here. I’m not sure how many IC devs have access to that. Which makes me think you don’t fall into the group that they’ve defined as IC.

grepLeighOP3y ago

I started getting purchasing authority around the senior level, when I also had some amount of hiring authority. Even if you don't have a company card, there's typically a process where you can get reimbursed for expenses.

If you are an IC reading this and have never tried to expense a tool you find valuable, give it a shot. You might end up surprised at how much management appreciates the ability to trade money for business value.

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