Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.

As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).

But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.

It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.

At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.

Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.

That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.

IT charging other departments is standard practice at every large company I've been at.

I've seen it too - not uncommon. A frustrating angle is vendor lockin. You are required to only use the internal IT team for everything, even if they're far more expensive and less skilled. They can 'charge' whatever they want, and you're stuck with their skills, prices and timeline. Going outside of that requires many levels of signoffs/approvals, and untold amounts of time making your case. There's value in having some central purchasing process, but when you limit your vendors to one (internal or external) you'll creating a lot more problems that you don't need to have.