I tried estimating how much time this is going to save over the SaaS economy and came up with the answer “multiple engineer lifetimes.”
Nobody founds a SaaS company because they really, really want to spend an engineering sprint on customer- and CS- facing tooling for subscription management.
(And nobody ever actually finishes these in an engineering sprint. They are tarpits of maintenance hell.)
(And nobody ever actually finishes these in an engineering sprint. They are tarpits of maintenance hell.)
“Doesn’t sounds that bad?”
So if you do the obvious thing and just create a view which shows invoice information you’re going to get a lot of emails saying “I need a real invoice to send to Accounting.”
And then you just realized that PDF generation is in scope for your project
So if you do the obvious thing and just create a view which shows invoice information you’re going to get a lot of emails saying “I need a real invoice to send to Accounting.”
And then you just realized that PDF generation is in scope for your project
And then people start complaining about what is on the invoices. You’re going to become a subject matter expert on the joys of German expense reports and accounting standards, never revealed all at once.
And at some point you’re going to realize “Wait, we are naively generating invoices at-need, but some of the information on them like customer addresses or plan prices is volatile, so some of our historical invoices *are wrong now.*”
So you get to do document persistence.
So you get to do document persistence.
Then if you’re exceptionally scrupulous you spent a sprint doing “Alright how do I forensically reconstruct every payment made and reconcile against our accounting such that I am sure these ‘newly generated for the last time’ historical invoices mostly match the ‘real’ ones?”
(Sketch of math: most people would scope this as one two-week engineering sprint, at least until they’ve been burned by this. You get something like 25 sprints a year and a 40 year career, so one engineer contributes ~1,000 sprints in a career. There are many more than 50k SaaS.)
(If you think “Imagine what good 50+ statistically composited talented people could do over the course of their careers if they were not spending all of them on creating credit card update UIs” then you’d perhaps enjoy working at Stripe.
We do the toilsome work, right, once.)
We do the toilsome work, right, once.)
