Goldman's $50K Google Alerts

Jesse Pujji shares a story about discovering an expensive enterprise software service while working at Goldman Sachs.

"I'm sitting there at Goldman, and my boss comes up to me and says 'You gotta set up FirstRain.' I'm looking through it and it's like pull this stock ticker and get an alert to your inbox when there's news about this company. I'm like 'This is just Google alerts.'

She's like 'What's Google alerts?' And I'm like 'What do we pay a month for this?' She says 'Oh we pay like $2,000 per license.' Our group is like 40 people, so I'm thinking we're paying $80,000 a month. She goes 'No no, we got a discount - it's $50,000 a month we're paying for this Google alerts thing.'

What's crazy is they justified it by saying 'Oh it's $50,000 a month but if it gets us one trade ahead of somebody else, it's paid for itself for the full year.' Because of the numbers they're dealing in, they can just pay anything."