Condolences to the Kite team. But, congratulations, too - you have some of the highest value engineering experience in the world. I'm sure you'll land somewhere great; try and take some time off if you can afford it!
Mulling over business models, and noticing the 'devs won't pay' narrative in the blog post, it's interesting to see the existing business models in AI; basically they seem to be:
* API-driven cloud calls (this is a way to get high value out of your existing cluster if you're AWS, MS, etc.)
* Platform play + possible eventual lock-in: OpenAI/Microsoft
* Subscription service for very specific needs (Grammarly, writing support)
I wonder if engineers would pay $9.99/month (or even $49.99/month) for a 'grammar checker for PRs' - essentially: "Avoid embarrassing bugs before you commit". That is, I wonder if Kite could have been successfully sold as the third tier - sub service for something very specific.
I guess if it's a good idea, someone could pull the Kite repos and launch it -- but my guess is there may be a market in there.
Devs almost always lack any kind of purchase authority. Any tool that appeals to devs needs to appeal to their management more, either showing some kind of cost savings over existing tools, increased dev productivity, or the new fangled "dev experience" where this tool, by shear awesomeness, will let devs put aside the low salary, process hell, and keep them employed.
I understand that's Kite's perspective (and yours -- "purchasing won't pay for this"), but devs are not paid meager salaries in general, and definitely might care about their code quality when it's put out in 'public' whether that be internal repos, or github.
Payscale estimates average engineering salary as having between $3,000 and $7,000 a month more in disposable income over writers -- and I would guess almost every professional writer pays for grammarly.
But, I agree that this is a new concept, and just spitballing -- right now, these sorts of linters and code formatting tools are mostly open source, so it would be some product marketing work to see if the market would actually pay.
> I understand that's Kite's perspective (and yours -- "purchasing won't pay for this"), but devs are not paid meager salaries in general
Perhaps an under-appreciated perspective – most of us don't come from families that were paid the sort of salaries we get; and consequently we are more likely to be irrationally stingy about money as a result of having grown up (relatively) poor. I know that $200/year is not a significant cost at my salary; but I do remember a time when that would have been totally out of reach for me.
And also there's the fairness aspect – do I want to be participating in a system where only rich devs can get access to good tools? Yes, I understand that the world is not fair and already works that way, but I should probably not perpetuate that system; and instead, make work pay for it.
Like everything in most companies, it's never about money, it's about control/power. It's inevitably someone's job to manage all the SaaS shit at a company, and damnit we just bought a JetBrains license why do you need Copilot?
If you don't have a massive platform (ie if you aren't Amazon or MS) the vertical end to end solution is much more easy to sell - ie sell the benefit directly.
Mulling over business models, and noticing the 'devs won't pay' narrative in the blog post, it's interesting to see the existing business models in AI; basically they seem to be:
* API-driven cloud calls (this is a way to get high value out of your existing cluster if you're AWS, MS, etc.)
* Platform play + possible eventual lock-in: OpenAI/Microsoft
* Subscription service for very specific needs (Grammarly, writing support)
I wonder if engineers would pay $9.99/month (or even $49.99/month) for a 'grammar checker for PRs' - essentially: "Avoid embarrassing bugs before you commit". That is, I wonder if Kite could have been successfully sold as the third tier - sub service for something very specific.
I guess if it's a good idea, someone could pull the Kite repos and launch it -- but my guess is there may be a market in there.