On the other hand I worked for a small place that was spending over 250k'ish per year on website maintenance to a company that setup their headless CMS website that they sold them.

They complained about it constantly but they kept paying (7 years and going when I was doing work for them which by they way they constantly tried to shortchange me). Never feel bad about taking money from a company, its just business. Setup your income stream and take care of yourself. I'm not sure why there is this bizarre self sacrificing mentality in tech to make other people rich at your own expense.

Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

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gjsman-1000 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

Buying into proprietary software and walled gardens is ridiculously common and acceptable in a business environment. That's code for "no liability if something goes wrong, minimal maintenance, and easy onboarding of new employees."

	▲	citizenpaul 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>common and acceptable in a business environment Duh. The comment context was in response to selling something to a company as a service. If you are just being an unofficial middle man between a SaaS and your customer you are going to make very little money. Its essentially uber for tech, you are going to be bearing the burden of all the implementation friction. On top of that you are acting as an uncommissioned sales person for the SaaS while they collect income indefinitely from your work. The difference in how you setup the deal is literally millions of dollars in the real life example I mentioned. I don't care about corporations. I want HN posters to make money for their work and skills rather than be used and tossed in the trash by corporations. Guess what? The company is still in business and doing fine. The owner just gets one less lambo per year and a developer gets to feed their family. Its also worth mentioning the obvious only reason they still pay the small consultancy is that they are constantly asking for changes and new things. Why would you want the extra overhead of working in someone elses sandbox when you have to do all the work anyway. Might as well be on your terms if you are going to do the work.

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jslaby 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is some truth to this. One of the fails we had was pricing our product too low, where it was looked at as a stepping stone to something more expensive, even though it provided the same exact functionality minus the fancy looking ui. There were businesses that wanted to get out of their existing application suite, but are hooked in due to management perception and the sunk cost fallacy. The company who overpriced considerably is reaping millions per year on that application. If I could just go back in time..