🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, Johnson, thank you for forwarding this… visionary piece of marketing collateral. I’ve read through this "Small Gods" proposal, and I have to say, the audacity is almost impressive. It starts with the central premise that their platform—their "god"—only has power because people believe in it. Are you kidding me? They put their entire vendor lock-in strategy right in the first paragraph. “Oh, our value is directly proportional to how deeply you entangle your entire tech stack into our proprietary ecosystem? How wonderfully synergistic!”

This isn't a platform; it's a belief system with a recurring license fee. The document claims Om the tortoise god only has one true believer left. Let me translate that from marketing-speak into balance-sheet-speak: they’re admitting their system requires a single point of failure. We’ll have one engineer, Brutha, who understands this mess. We’ll pay for his certifications, we’ll pay for his specialized knowledge, and the moment he gets a better offer, our "god" is just a tortoise—an expensive, immobile, and functionally useless piece of hardware sitting in our server room, depreciating faster than my patience.

They even have the nerve to quote this:

"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives."

Yes, I’ve met your sales team. The knives were very apparent. They call it "negotiating the ELA"; I call it a hostage situation. And this line about how "killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection"? That’s not a quirky joke; that’s what happens to our budget after we sign the contract.

Then we get to the "I Shall Wear Midnight" section. This is clearly the "Professional Services" addendum. The witches are the inevitable consultants they'll parade in when their "simple" system turns out to be a labyrinth of undocumented features. “We watch the edges,” they say. “Between life and death, this world and the next, right and wrong.” That’s a beautiful way of describing billable hours spent debugging their shoddy API integrations at 3 a.m.

My favorite part is this accidental moment of truth they included: “Well, as a lawyer I can tell you that something that looks very simple indeed can be incredibly complicated, especially if I'm being paid by the hour.” Thank you for your honesty. You’ve just described your entire business model. They sell us the "simple sun" and then charge us a fortune for the "huge tail of complicated" fusion reactions that make it work.

And finally, the migration plan: "Quantum Leap." A reboot of an old idea that feels "magical" but is based on "wildly incorrect optimism." Perfect. So we’re supposed to "leap" our terabytes of critical customer data from our current, stable system into their paradigm-shifting new one. The proposal notes the execution can be "unintentionally offensive" and that they tried a "pivot/twist, only to throw it out again."

So, their roadmap is a suggestion at best. They'll promise us a feature, we’ll invest millions in development around that promise, and then they’ll just… drop it. What were they thinking? I know what I'm thinking: about the seven-figure write-down I'll have to explain to the board.

Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math on the "true" cost of this Small Gods venture, since their five-page PDF conveniently omitted a pricing sheet.

• Initial Licensing ("The Offering"): Let's be generous and say it's $500,000. This is just the entry fee to the temple.
• Consulting Services ("The Witches"): A team of four "edge-watchers" at $350/hour to manage the "Quantum Leap" migration. They estimate six months. That’s 4 x 350 x 40 x 26… carry the one… that’s a $1.45 million implementation fee, assuming it doesn’t go over schedule. Which it will.
• Internal Training ("Indoctrination"): We need to turn our developers into "true believers." That’s a full quarter of lost productivity for a team of ten engineers, plus the cost of certification courses. Let’s ballpark that at another $400,000 in opportunity cost and fees.
• Infrastructure Overhead ("The Altar"): It runs on a proprietary appliance, of course. Another $250,000 for hardware we can't repurpose.
• The Exit Cost ("Apostasy"): In three years, when they inevitably get acquired and triple the price, the cost to migrate off this platform will be double the cost to migrate on.

So, your "simple" $500k solution is actually a $2.6 million Year One investment, with a baked-in escalator clause for future financial pain. The ROI on this isn’t just negative; it’s a black hole that will consume the entire IT budget and possibly the company cafeteria.

So, Johnson, my answer is no. We will not be pursuing a partnership with a vendor whose business model is based on faith, whose service plan is witchcraft, and whose migration strategy is a failed TV reboot. Thank you for the light reading, but please remove me from this mailing list. I have budgets to approve that actually produce value.