Hot take: I blew $120 on a fancy dependency scanner that just re-flagged the same old stuff
I want to come clean about something. Six weeks ago I paid $120 for a year of a dependency scanning tool for my team, mostly because a demo made it look like it would catch things our free setup missed. It didn't. It flagged the same 11 outdated packages that our existing scanner already warned us about, and the setup took my whole Tuesday afternoon. What really changed my mind was when our senior dev ran a quick test project with a known bad library, and the paid tool sat there silent while our free one caught it in under a minute. I emailed support and got a canned reply about tuning the ruleset, which felt like paying extra to do more work. I ended up canceling after the trial window closed, so that $120 is gone. Now I'm second-guessing every appsec tool purchase, so I'd like to hear what actually earned its keep on your team and what turned out to be a waste of budget.