Monetary Cost vs Human Cost

Today at work some product person was trialing out Stripe Sigma SQL. There were some discussion of cost of using and I suggested that maybe we don’t need to spend that cost by suggesting some substitution. We already synced our Stripe Database to BigQuery through Segment so we can just perform the query inBigQuery.

And then there was clarification that Stripe Sigma SQL was actually an AI tool that helps with writing the query from plain English. Again, I suggested that ChatGPT or Github Copilot can do the same thing with minimal cost.

However, the CTO is right in that the monetary cost of Stripe Sigma SQL is not the only cost. The human cost of having to write the query and maintain the query is also a cost. Therefore it’s probably better to just pay the $40 to use Stripe Sigma SQL.

I think he is right, as engineers we often forget the human cost of things. We often think that we can do everything ourselves but we often forget that the cost of doing it ourselves and the maintenance cost afterwards. Also we need to enable other non technical people to do things themselves.