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Comment by wand3r | Hacker News Reader

Adjacent question, leaving aside value proposition. Do companies pay for 1000 seats like this? I didn't realize slack is $5 a user a month. Do they discount this for bulk, or are companies paying $5k/month $60k/yearly? These subscriptions must really add up.

On All In, they discussed the leverage from AI tools and they probably also meant open source, but one of the companies just rolled their own instance of a big monthly SaaS product because it was such a big expense for the startup.

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I'm not really in the know, but I bet the enterprise discounts don't kick in until you're at the tens of thousands of users. In any case, $60k sounds like a lot as a top-line figure to some bean-counter, but all these sales pitches follow the same basic pattern:

- This is an essential, best-in-class tool. You wouldn't deny your employees a laptop or a free lunch, would you?

- $5/user/mo is a bargain compared to the hassle of building/hosting this yourself, punching holes in your firewall every time you need to receive a webhook, dealing with security and auth issues.

- $60k is half the cost of someone you don't need to hire on your in-house IT team. Does it make sense yet?

> I bet the enterprise discounts don't kick in until you're at the tens of thousands of users

I'll take that bet ;) Not really sure about OpenAI, but you can absolutely negotiate with almost any company.

This is why the price of "Enterprise" level of SaaS is always "Contact Us". Contract deals (i.e. "lock-in") are negotiated behind the scenes.

you'd be amazed at how many startups waste 100s of thousands(and millions) of dollars on buying seats for tools that barely anybody uses. Interest rate increases have made VC startups get a little smarter, but a few years ago it was really bad. Similar to how tons of startups burn huge amounts of money on AWS due to laziness

Yeah, companies really do. Once a year our company gets a really large bill (15k users, several services).

The thing is those same people need to be paid, and that’s a much (100x) larger bill, so the extra amount doesn’t really signify.

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