alt Hacker NewsAtlassian tools for a client like mine (hundreds of employees) can easily cover the expense of internalizing it. It's Jira plus confluence mostly, it's not rocket science.
And that's just atlassian.
Start adding stuff that costs many many many yearly salaries (special software for managing inventories and warehouses) it starts making sense to prototype alternatives internally.
I came to the conclusion that if it's not Teams/SharePoint or the moat is on the extreme legal complexity side (e.g. payrolls), you can at least think of building an alternative that is good enough without needing to be perfect.
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Don’t forget the salary for every dev team having the Atlassian Jira Jockey to mess around with the board all day and make sure the next 7 epics worth of tickets are in the 9 columns and in prioritised order.
Where would we be without them!?
jira premium is $15/mo/user for 300 users. you're saying $50k can cover developing the app inclusive of integrations, maintaining it, providing 24/7 service and 3 9s uptime (per the sla)? don't forget compliance and security. maybe the logic is everyone can be fired and replaced with agents?
I told to my colleague that it would take less time for me to vibe code jira that it would take him to configure it. Sounds crazy ? Not so much : factor the part of jira you use (maybe 10%), the many choices and dimensions you have to configure, the time it take and the complexity it bring. On the other side, the vibe code version have only the fields you want, most of the logic hard written in code (ie epic > story >task...), and that you could do anything any role, any authentication scheme.
Ugh you are aware that Atlassian earlier was providing on-perm edition for years.
You also know how neglected those on-perm instances were?
No one updated those, no one wanted to pay for more CPU/RAM. File storage, I know people who had some random requests to cleanup files from projects because company wouldn’t buy more hard drives. Everyone was nagging at sys admins that they do bad job and at Atlassian that JIRA sucks.
That is mostly why Atlassian pulled off on premise because companies would not update at all, would like to have all new features and also not pay for file storage,RAM, CPU to make it work well.
Don’t forget you still will need to have dedicated employees to deal with AI built solution - because existing employees have work to do.
What we pay for JIRA and Confluence would never offset fact that we pay and it works, NOT A SINGLE EMPLOYEE CARES as they have their job to do.