> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration.
This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.
After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.
Actually technically this is prohibited by stripe. They explicitly ban testing your app in production. We have offered suggestions many times to them, but still no feature here.
"Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy/pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff."
Thanks for the mention Francesco. I'm Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don't hesitate if you have any questions.
p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves.
I reproduced it to happen with just the animated glow behind the todo list. Zooming in and then out to this animation throws my 14.2 XS Max to the lock screen.
I really appreciate this list. It's cool to see how people work, and I'm sure the folks building the services you're using appreciate the kind words.
I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I'll explain it in case it's at all representative of other reactions being posted here.
I think it's just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I'm imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I'm not currently managing, etc, and I'm not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn't match yours.
It's easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it's not solving a problem I personally have.
But on the other hand it's hard to imagine getting less than 12/mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it's hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they're using.
So I'll skip the judgment about how you're spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.
SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.
really interesting reading the comments where people are trying to cost optimize, and then others justifying the costs by time saved. Seems to me both ways of thinking about this is the wrong mindset. The more important thing is the operational "flow", how your toolsets come together to allow you to operate your business. Trying to micro optimize costs is not terribly useful, one sass offering on it's own may not terribly justify itself, but because they way it connects with other pieces of your operation, the overall flow is better, and therefore justified. It's the difference between an "accountants" way of seeing a business vs systematic thinking. Much important to think about how the "whole" than the parts.
While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now!
I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method.
I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!
That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything.
We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution.
But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage.
As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible.
If ~$200/month materially effects your runway, what you're saying is true, but even super duper early stage bootstrapped startups have that kind of cash, in my (admittedly limited) experience.
And it's not like you don't need what these services are providing, you'd just then have to do it yourself, and honestly I'm finding time to be more valuable than money right this very moment in the startup I'm working at...
After reading the comments, whether SaaS is worth it seems to depend on a company's circumstances.
A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that's self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.
Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.
You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.
A bit off topic, does anyone know a guide or a good starting point to build landing page that look that clean and modern. For example the landing page for this website https://savvycal.com/
An alternative to Vercel and more budget friendly is AWS Amplify console. Costs just a few cents per build, connects with GitHub and you have multiple environments. I’ve had a decent experience - though far from perfect, justifies the cost.
MIRO If I ever grow to a large enough org, I will RUN towards paying for a Miro subscription. I will insist on religious level use of it. It is such a game changer.
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.
After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the mention Francesco. I'm Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don't hesitate if you have any questions.
p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves.
[1] https://missiveapp.com/
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|5 years ago|reply
Cool functionality, which my enterprise company would use it.
[+] [-] seehafer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skaber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankdilo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armatav|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maybevain|5 years ago|reply
https://codepen.io/maybevain/pen/mdrpPEg
[+] [-] faitswulff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarhaneef|5 years ago|reply
Also happens if you open it slowly, but you have to zoom in quite a bit.
The inner image is just an image but there is a component around that. I am not a front end person and don’t have a theory but I’m also curious now.
[+] [-] jorde|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sebastian_09|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ecco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squeaky-clean|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] symlinkk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjfin123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rukuu001|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steventey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etxm|5 years ago|reply
iOS 14.2
[+] [-] furyofantares|5 years ago|reply
I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I'll explain it in case it's at all representative of other reactions being posted here.
I think it's just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I'm imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I'm not currently managing, etc, and I'm not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn't match yours.
It's easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it's not solving a problem I personally have.
But on the other hand it's hard to imagine getting less than 12/mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it's hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they're using.
So I'll skip the judgment about how you're spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.
[+] [-] oliv__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanSrich|5 years ago|reply
- CloudFlare
- Roam
- Slack
- Linear
- Geekbot
SaaS I’m okay with paying for:
- Figma
- Gsuite
- Gusto
- Stripe
- Netlify
SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice:
- AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits)
- Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do)
- Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)
[+] [-] scrollaway|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Irishsteve|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankdilo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetrout|5 years ago|reply
We’re using Zenhub now and it’s slow and misused in our org (one giant project board instead of separate boards per repo / project).
Curious if anyone here is / has used linear and could compare their experience with it to Monday, Asana or Zenhub?
[+] [-] bamazizi|5 years ago|reply
I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method.
I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!
[+] [-] frankdilo|5 years ago|reply
We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution.
But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage.
As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible.
[1]: https://mailbrew.com
[+] [-] haburka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TameAntelope|5 years ago|reply
And it's not like you don't need what these services are providing, you'd just then have to do it yourself, and honestly I'm finding time to be more valuable than money right this very moment in the startup I'm working at...
[+] [-] unixhero|5 years ago|reply
It helps me focus on being productive and not trying to be a hosting provider to myself.
[+] [-] osamagirl69|5 years ago|reply
I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup
Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|5 years ago|reply
A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that's self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.
[+] [-] makach|5 years ago|reply
- hacker/cracker culture
[+] [-] zanellato19|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattfrommars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catchmeifyoucan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerapple|5 years ago|reply
I tried Linear, the interface is bit too bland to my taste. I am going to give it another try since there are so many good words about it in comments.
[+] [-] babik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixhero|5 years ago|reply