Is $1,500,000 enough for a 1.0 release?
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Join For FreeWe in the Plumbr team decided that it is. Over the last few months in beta our customers have solved more than 200 memory leaks with the help of Plumbr.
Along the lines we also worked out the initial pricing model. The use of Plumbr is still free and we do not expect you to pay a dime before we have proven our value. You are only asked to pay when Plumbr detects a leak in your application. Plumbr notifies you of the existence of the memory leak, but to find out what is leaking and how to fix it, we ask you to fill in the credit card details (you can do this only once if you buy a subscription).
How much do we charge? A lot less than the $7,500 you’d spend trying to solve the issue on your own. 1/30 of it seemed like a fair amount for a start, so that's what we are now charging you for the report.
But now - go ahead, download Plumbr, attach it to your application and be secured - no more memory leaks and sleepless nights hunting them down!
200
leaks sounds cool, but how does it translate to money? You cannot force
a leak to go away by just throwing piles of cash towards it. Instead of
spending cash you spend time. A lot of time - a memory leak in a
decently sized enterprise application takes around three man weeks to
solve. This includes the operations' and developers' collective time for
hunting and solving the leak, some QA time for regression testing, and
some management time for communication and release coordination. Of
course, the actual costs vary in a very large scale, but this is what we
currently can estimate based upon the initial customer feedback.
Three man-weeks might not sound awfully lot, but translate this into cash and things start to look a bit more sour. Quoting Fred Vilson - “A good rule of thumb is multiply the number of people on the team by $10k to get the monthly burn”. Ouch. This three weeks now looks more like a $7,500.
If
we now apply some hardcore math and multiply the 200 (number of leaks
found by Plumbr) by $7,500 (average cost to solve a leak) we can
confidently say we have saved at least $1,500,000 to our early
customers. This looked impressive, and as we didn't have any major bugs
open either, we decided to step ahead and call ourselves production
quality alias 1.0.
Along the lines we also worked out the initial pricing model. The use of Plumbr is still free and we do not expect you to pay a dime before we have proven our value. You are only asked to pay when Plumbr detects a leak in your application. Plumbr notifies you of the existence of the memory leak, but to find out what is leaking and how to fix it, we ask you to fill in the credit card details (you can do this only once if you buy a subscription).
How much do we charge? A lot less than the $7,500 you’d spend trying to solve the issue on your own. 1/30 of it seemed like a fair amount for a start, so that's what we are now charging you for the report.
But now - go ahead, download Plumbr, attach it to your application and be secured - no more memory leaks and sleepless nights hunting them down!
Release (agency)
Published at DZone with permission of Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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