> 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational
Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp.
Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost.
At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
An enterprise will _already_ have a team managing terraform infra. Them building the parts they need from that remaining 10% may be cheaper then paying HashiCorp. This is a difficult sell.
Also, a ton of Terraform's value comes from the fact that there are modules for everything. Some or developed by HashiCorp but most are developed by vendors or even users who want terraform support.
You've either done a lot of tech sales yourself or bought into the kool-aid software salespeople hand out. Their bread and butter is overstating per-engineer costs and hardware ownership costs, but it doesn't mean they're right.
In many places in europe you can hire a team of ~10 engineers already fully loaded for $1 million a year, or like 2 seniors and 4 midlevels or any combo like this. This is based off of 1st hand experience hiring for these salaries.
Yeah, but it buys 3 senior consultants, and they’re a fixed cost/capital expense and can be cut at any time. Operationally, it’s not that expensive to keep a Terraform platform floating. It’s expensive to build, and most companies need it yesterday. But bring in 3 people to support a team to build it in a year, then cut them free when it’s in v1, and leave your team to iterate and update. And now you’re not paying $1mm a year or more after that forever.
I think the point is that those three senior engineers could figure out how to do some SAML wrapper or remote execution on top of Open-Source Terraform instead of paying for the turn-key “Enterprise” features.
Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp.
Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost.
At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.