Salesforce

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.

Fin's pitch is an AI agent that resolves support tickets across chat, email, phone, WhatsApp and Slack, powered by a proprietary model called Apex that it claims beats frontier models on resolution rate.

Two people who built in the space called the category a grift: the bots don't solve the reason a human contacts support in the first place, and customers would rather wait for a person than loop with a wrong answer.