Pay the Money

by Steve Parker

Published 1998-09-01    Printer-friendly version

"I need a template to ...." "Does anyone have something that will ...."

These are two common requests on the Topspeed newsgroups. They are often followed by:

"Too much money ... I want something that is free."

I suspect that I am as ... penurious as anyone in the Clarion community. But, there's penurious and there's stupid.

"Penurious," to me means spending one's money wisely, getting value for money spent. "Stupid" is looking at price, not functionality and cost/benefit.

I'm not going to argue the case for purchasing third party products. I'm going to tell you the story of how I discovered that purchased code is almost inevitably cheaper than created code.

Eight or nine years ago, I needed a function for a specific purpose. There was a third party vendor advertising a package that contained such a function plus many, many more. The package cost US$60 (remember, this is 1989-90 dollars).

Well, I wasn't going to reach into my pocket for that much money. I wasn't going to because I remembered something in the Annotated Examples that provided a similar functionality. With a little study, it was obvious, I could extract what I needed.

At the time, my hourly rate was US$25. So, the breakeven point was just a bit over two hours. (With inflation, the package today would cost about US$150 and my hourly rate is now $75, so nothing has changed here.)

Two weeks latter (i.e., 100+ hours), I had a function that (1) worked, (2) I couldn't figure out why it worked (in other words, I could not really rely on it) and (3) was huge (several hundred lines of code but should have been no more than half a dozen). Now, what could be worse?

I bought the third party product. Of course.

$60 vs. two weeks.

Let's get objective. This represented an opportunity cost to me of about US$2500. Can you say "bad trade-off"? And this does not include costs involved with delayed delivery to the customer (my time on this was not billable) or costs associated with aggravation.

The next time you kvell at the price of an add-on, calculate the cost to duplicate the functionality (if there is no product offering what you need, that's a different story). $60 or two weeks...

"But," you say, "what if the vendor goes out of business or stops supporting the product or...?" As long as there are no black boxes (i.e., you are purchasing templates or code is included), who cares? And if there are, and the product does a superior job, you're worrying about what may well be years in the future. What if the vendor still is in business and supporting the product?

$60 - two weeks.

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942