Jira pencils out at 4 hours a month; Salesforce demands 1.5 engineers (brandur.org)
Price a $200k engineer at roughly $96 an hour and the math gets blunt. A $400/month tool needs only about four maintenance hours a month to justify rebuilding; a $25k/month Salesforce contract implies about 1.5 engineers to stand still.
So the cheap tools fail build-vs-buy and the expensive ones pass it, the opposite of intuition. The post doubles as a launch for River, Brandur's open-source queue.
The thread's counter: the real cost was never the features. It's SSO, audit logs, and the integration web — the moat an LLM won't clone.
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