@iseff: So I know Cognition doesn’t care about Little Ole’ Me, and this is just my story, so take it with a grain of salt, but …

So I know Cognition doesn’t care about Little Ole’ Me, and this is just my story, so take it with a grain of salt, but here’s why I don’t think all these crazy scaling revenue numbers by coding agents are going to stick:

We’ve been happy Devin users for a while. Really like the product, and like the company. Still do! This isn’t shade at Cognition, and I’m not upset with them, just a sample of why I worry about the competitive landscape for these cos.

Anyway, our usage grew to >$100k run rate or so. I think one or two of our users even received an email congratulating them for being Top 200 users of Devin.

As usage grew, we added more capabilities and needed a BAA (layman’s terms: an agreement that says they are HIPAA compliant). This required an Enterprise contract (why a piece of paper requires extra money is a topic for another discussion, but it’s very normal…) so we started talking to their sales team.

Basically, we were going to ~1.5x our spend in order to get the BAA. Honestly, that was fine with us. We like Devin!

Our only request was to pay quarterly (already a big concession from our existing monthly payments, given our relatively small size). They declined, unless we committed to EVEN MORE usage.

Before responding, I decided to see how difficult it would be to set up Hermes to do the equivalent work as Devin, and to see what the costs were. I’d host it in our infrastructure and only use providers we already have a BAA with.

Two days.

That’s it. It’s functionally 100% equivalent. Maybe slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others. We spend a little bit of time futzing with it, but we did that with Devin, too.

The cost is roughly 25% of Devin.

So, two days for $100k or so per year savings. All because they didn’t want us to pay quarterly.

At some point, other companies are going to catch onto this, too. So congrats on this milestone, but keep finding more ways to provide value and keep customers happy. It’s hard to compete.

Cognition (@cognition): Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate.

This milestone belongs to our customers. Here’s how a few of them are building with Devin.