Sure, labour costs are expensive in our industry. But it's under-appreciated that once you need physical infrastructure, sales and enterprise support, that really tends to eat into your millions.
Please excuse my ignorance about this, but what do "cloud and enterprise" costs entail? Password managers seem to me like a pretty basic CRUD app. I'd imagine the average user has a few KB's max stored, and data transfer is presumably very small (no images/video/other binary data). And enterprise users are presumably running the infra on-prem so I'd think the main costs have to do with support.
Is marketing the thing with the huge price tag, or are there other huge costs I'm not thinking of?
I'll use a past life as an example; 150 person company -- 20ish people in engineering total: 5ish on doing infra, and 3 dev teams of 5ish working different verticals.
Then you have leadership, sales, marketing, HR, finance, support, and retention. By a huge margin sales, support, and retention were the largest. B2C is marketing heavy, B2B is sales heavy. If you're both then well..
Engineering can be really lean with respect to the number of customers/clients but the rest of the business can't.
Sure, labour costs are expensive in our industry. But it's under-appreciated that once you need physical infrastructure, sales and enterprise support, that really tends to eat into your millions.