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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

> Dev Tools are the hardest business on earth

Don't most people say that about their niche of the tech industry? Healthtech. Online dating. Edtech. Game dev. You name it.

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Ask yourself this: how many dev tools have you or people you worked with actually paid for over the years? I know a couple guys that paid for IntelliJ, back before VS Code got popular.

A tremendous amount I have paid for in the past or still pay for today. Github, Github Copilot, Rider, Reviewable, Lucidcharts, Heroku, Render, CircleCI, Browserstack, Datadog, Launchdarkly, Postman, Sentry, Amplitude, Imgix, Zeplin, Cloudinary, ngrok, dbt, ... the list goes on and on.

Another option to Cloudinary is reimage.dev, which I’m the founder of. Currently have a lifetime deal at lifetime.reimage.dev

https://pinggy.io is a more affordable option than n grok.

Cloudflare tunnels are free.

That part rings true, if slightly hyperbolic.

It’s like opening a restaurant that only serves other chefs. Not easy!

Never sell things your customers can build themselves.

So with that logic, google shouldn’t ever buy anything from anyone…

Clearly false.

"Never sell something your customers could build themselves" and "never buy anything you could build yourself" are not the same thing.

? Not really. You can reword it and say that just because google can build it means you shouldn’t try to sell it to them. And google can build pretty much anything at this point if they wanted to.

Google’s budget for software and services I’m sure is in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. So again, obviously false.

They make their own NICs, GPUs, SSDs and CPUs so you aren't wrong but you also miss the point entirely. I made a statement about customers, not Google. You should have an LLM correct your logic.

This reminds me of Dwight from the office in the episode where he doesn’t tip the delivery driver and says: I never tip for anything I can do myself. I can deliver this if I want to.

He also notes that he does tip the guy who pulverizes his kidney stones.

One nice thing about SaaS is that the “aaS” part is just as important as the “S”.

Yea, I don't buy that line at all.

AWS is "just dev tools" and it's one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

AWS most certainly is not just dev tools. AWS is a physical product (servers, drives, cables, networks, switches, cooling, monitoring, redundancy, security...) that you merely interact with remotely. You can't recreate AWS just by writing code.

Exactly. Devtools has had a rather generous number of unicorns in the last 15 years as a tech category. There are many others that can't say the same.

https://www.failory.com/startups/developer-tools-unicorns (unrelated, but thatgamecompany as dev tools? that's a first)

I would categorize that as infrastructure, not a dev tool. Terraform and terraform cloud on the other hand…

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