how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge...

AstroBen · 2026-02-04T21:00:40 1770238840

Atlassian: surviving since 2002 because no-one could previously build a kanban board or project management app

no_wizard · 2026-02-04T21:18:16 1770239896

I think the value is lost on the end user, but it’s more readily apparent to everyone above them.

I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.

Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought

Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira

9dev · 2026-02-04T21:33:33 1770240813

Did vanilla Jira for a while, battled with a web app that is actively trying to make you hate it—switched our team to Linear, couldn't be happier ever since.

no_wizard · 2026-02-04T21:44:09 1770241449

As far as the Atlassian suite goes I do much prefer Trello.

I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically

llmslave · 2026-02-04T21:53:46 1770242026

no the difference is 90% cost savings, which was previously impossible

AstroBen · 2026-02-04T22:01:28 1770242488

How does a company charging 10% their competitor afford to compete on marketing, sales, design, user testing or customer service?

(this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)

insom · 2026-02-04T22:34:17 1770244457

Well for marketing and sales your bigger competitor is already doing the work of showing companies that they want the functionality at all, and the cheaper competitor's sales and marketing pitch can be: we are much cheaper.

This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.

(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?

llmslave · 2026-02-04T22:47:35 1770245255

they dont, which is why these companies are going to get smoked. a small team of people will compete with atlassian head on. the whole saas business model is under threat

ehutch79 · 2026-02-04T21:06:56 1770239216

Yeah.... The code isn't the hard part. That's not where the value is.

This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.

I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.

Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...

This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.

llmslave · 2026-02-04T22:40:57 1770244857

this is what the stock market is pricing in