the hidden cost of maintenance
made w/ midjourney
Kevin Kelly has a great bit of advice about estimating cost. When you look at the price of an item, you should revise the sticker price up, maybe as much as 2x. This doubling accounts for the cost of maintaining, repairing, and disposing of the item.
I’ve applied this wisdom here and there for personal, consumer purchases. I’m also finding it’s a good heuristic for operational outlays in projects.
A recent example: I’m producing a podcast and we recently recorded an episode with a professional Director of Photography (DP) using his high-end equipment - a way nicer rig than we had access to for earlier episodes.
We were excited about the quality of the footage we would get. And it does, indeed, look super nice: depth, color, crispness all sing through each frame.
What I didn’t account for was the huge size of the video files that this high-end equipment would create. It took way longer to move those files and then to package and proxy them for editing. Any mistake made in those steps took hours to correct instead of minutes. Ultimately, my collaborator and I realized we would need new cables, computers and hard drives, with more storage and faster processing, to work with footage like this.
We made the mistake of assuming the narrow cost to acquire this valuable stuff was the total cost. We ignored the large costs to manipulate and maintain. This was a big underestimate.
Places this might show up for you, in your own venture:
a high-priced consultant (typically, you’re paying for their advice. That doesn’t cover the implementation.)
enterprise software (eventually orgs have to let go of a lovingly edited google sheet for a “real” CRM, eg, but doing this too soon makes everyone’s life worse. You have to learn how to use the software, pay for a license to it, migrate your data into it, potentially hire people who specialize in it. Each of those comes at a cost, too)
branding and marketing services (Cracker Barrel and the city of Austin will be quick to tell you that achieving your goals here takes much more than getting a pretty .pdf from your designers)
I’m not saying it’s wrong to spend on these sorts of things, or even to spend a lot on them. I am saying clarity about what it actually costs to make use of them is important before you buy.
-eric
