🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, let's see what the marketing department has forwarded me this time. [Adjusts glasses, squints at the screen] "MongoDB is among the winners of the annual Glassdoor list of Best-Led Companies." Oh, how wonderful. I'm sure that award will look lovely framed on the wall of the bankruptcy court after we sign their contract. I’m thrilled their employees feel so inspired and trusted every day. Of course they do. They’re not the ones staring down a seven-figure invoice that has more mysterious line items than my teenage son’s credit card statement.

But let's put down the champagne for their "external badge of honor" and pick up the calculator, shall we? Because I’m reading about their new "feature-rich" MongoDB 8.2 and this "Application Modernization Platform," and my ulcers are already doing the cha-cha. In my world, "feature-rich" means "requires a team of six-figure specialists to operate," and "Application Modernization Platform" is just a fancy, five-syllable way of saying vendor lock-in. It's not a platform; it's a gilded cage. You check in, but you can never leave. Not without a "migration fee" that costs more than the GDP of a small island nation.

They’re very proud to serve nearly 60,000 organizations. I see that as 60,000 finance departments who’ve been hypnotized by buzzwords like "state-of-the-art accuracy" and "trustworthy, reliable AI applications." Let’s do some of my famous back-of-the-napkin math on what this trust really costs.

The salesperson will slide a proposal across the table. Let’s call it a cool $500,000 for the initial license. A bargain! they'll say. But Penny Pincher knows better.

• The Migration March: That’s a six-month, all-hands-on-deck death march for our entire engineering team to move our data from a perfectly functional, paid-for system into their proprietary funhouse. Productivity plummets. Let's conservatively add $450,000 in salaries for engineers who are now professional data plumbers instead of, you know, building our actual product.
• The Re-Education Camp: Now we have to "re-skill" our team. That’s another $100,000 for training, certifications, and workshops where they learn the sacred MongoDB way of doing things they already knew how to do.
• The Inevitable Consultants: Three months into the migration, when everything is on fire, we’ll have to bring in their "preferred implementation partners." These are the high priests of the Mongo cult who bill at $400 an hour to read the manual for you. Budget another $250,000 for them to tell us we're doing it all wrong.

So, their "delightful" $500k solution has now metastasized into a True Total Cost of Ownership of $1.3 million for the first year alone. And that’s before we even talk about the surprise "data egress fees" or the mandatory "premium enterprise-grade platinum-plated support" renewal that will increase by 40% next year just because they can.

I see their employees are quoted here. It’s all very touching.

“I saw firsthand the transparent nature of our leadership team... it does not come at the expense of our people.” - Ava Thompson, Executive Support

Of course it doesn't come at the expense of your people, Ava. It comes at the expense of MY people's budget.

And Charles from FP&A, my counterpart. “I've been fortunate to see and drive change at the individual level.” That’s a lovely way of saying, “I spend my days trying to figure out how to re-categorize our cloud spend so the board doesn't realize this database costs more than our entire sales team.”

They claim their leaders are "building an environment where people feel empowered to take risks." The only risk I see is the one we’re taking with our company’s solvency. They promise some astronomical ROI, a fantasy number conjured up in a spreadsheet. They say this will make us agile and innovative. But my napkin math shows that after paying for their ecosystem, we won't have enough money left to innovate on our office coffee, let alone our technology stack. This investment won’t deliver a 300% ROI; it’ll deliver a 100% chance of me needing to update my resume.

They say they're not just building next-generation technology, but "building the next generation of leaders."

Let me be clear. You’re not building leaders. You’re building dependents, locked into your ecosystem, praying the renewal price doesn’t double. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go approve a budget for Post-it Notes and ballpoint pens—an investment with a clear, immediate, and understandable return.