Hacker News Reader

Ouch. That's also well above the threshold where we'd have to get IT approval to use them as a vendor, complete with security reviews, comparison shopping with other vendors, bringing in the legal team to look at the contract, etc. It's not "just" writing a check for $30K and calling it a day.

View on HN

The unfortunate truth (that I've had to learn the hard way as a founder) is that whole IT approval process is inevitable for any vendor indexing source code.

Even when I've tried to offer lower price tiers, ~every company of 20+ people puts a ton of bureaucracy in place before disclosing source code. Dealing with this bureaucracy has a fixed cost, so it's inevitable that many companies end up excluding the lower end entirely.

The sweetest words in any purchase: "on prem". It avoids so very many such hassles.

Customers who insist on on prem require the most support burden and hassles.

Have you shipped commercial on-prem software? Nobody wants to do it for <$1k. It's miserable.

I have and you're right. But in the context we're discussing here of buying software that has access to sensitive company data, on-prem is so much easier to approve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com