🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, what a delightful surprise to see this announcement. My morning coffee nearly went cold from the sheer thrill of it. A new partnership! How... collaborative. It’s always encouraging to see vendors finding new and innovative ways to help us spend our budget.

The promise of real-time, multi-channel web analytics is particularly inspired. I’ve always felt our current analytics were far too… patient. Waiting a few seconds for a report to load is an inefficiency we simply cannot afford. And providing this for Ghost 6.0 is a masterstroke. It's a fantastic incentive to finally undertake that minor, six-month, all-hands-on-deck platform migration we've been putting off. I’m sure the developer hours required for that are practically free. It's for a feature, after all.

I appreciate the nod to Ghost being the "developer's most beloved open-source publishing platform." It’s a wonderful reminder of the good old days, before we decided to bolt on a proprietary, enterprise-grade solution with what I can only assume will be an equally enterprise-grade price tag. It’s the perfect blend of freedom and financial obligation, like a beautiful, open-caged bird with a diamond ankle bracelet chained to a very, very expensive perch.

Let’s just do some quick back-of-the-napkin math on the “true cost of ownership” here. It’s a fun little exercise I like to do.

• The "Partnership" Fee: I can't seem to find the price anywhere, which is always my favorite kind of pricing model. It suggests a bespoke, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” conversation with a sales associate named Chad. Let’s be conservative and pencil in a charming “starter” license at $50,000 annually, probably billed per seat, per channel, per real-time-thought.
• The Ghost 6.0 Migration: Our current theme is beautifully customized. It will, of course, shatter into a million pieces during the upgrade. Let’s budget a conservative 800 developer-hours to rebuild it, test it, and weep over the deprecated features. At our blended rate, that’s a breezy $120,000. Chump change for synergy.
• Training: Our marketing team will need to be re-trained on this new, undoubtedly intuitive platform. That’s only a week of lost productivity for five people. A mere $15,000 value.
• The Inevitable Consultants: When the migration inevitably goes sideways, we'll need to bring in the vendor’s “Implementation Success Gurus.” They’re always a bargain at $450/hour, with a 100-hour minimum. So, that’s a predictable $45,000 to fix the thing we just paid for.
• Infrastructure Overhead: "Real-time" is a magical word that translates to "more server capacity." I'll just add a 20% buffer to our cloud hosting bill for perpetuity. Let's call that an extra $55,000 a year, just to be safe.

So, the grand total for these wonderful new real-time analytics isn't just the license. It’s a Year One investment of $285,000. For an analytics plugin.

The return on investment is simply self-evident.

Of course, it is. For a mere quarter-million dollars, we get to know, in real-time, that a user in Des Moines has clicked on our ‘Careers’ page. If we can use that data to drive just one additional enterprise sale worth $285,001, we’ll be in the black. The business case practically writes itself. If we do this for four quarters, we'll have spent over a million dollars to… check our traffic. I'm sure the board will see the wisdom in that.

So, bravo on the announcement. A truly ambitious proposal. It’s always refreshing to see such… aspirational thinking in the marketplace.

Keep these ideas coming. My red pen is getting thirsty.