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Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

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31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#31
None so far I think. I could be missing something, but looking briefly at what I spend money on, I don't think any of it counts as SaaS.

I do spend money on various IaaS offerings. But none of the services on top of that have come up so far as something I feel I need. But I'm doing mostly research (which is also my job) and side projects, not running a tech business. I need servers, not so much services. There are some vaguely relevant services (like machine-learning-as-a-service), but I generally don't feel comfortable being dependent on an external service for my actual research. So I'd only use these if it was an ancillary need and not something where I might need to publish the results. There's also a move towards asking researchers to ship VMs of their test setup as a replicable archive of the work, and dependencies on external services are a no-go for that.

For my personal life, Dropbox is the closest I came to paying for. But then I realized I was mostly just using it to back up photos, which seemed like a use-case it's not even designed for. So I moved those to a local backup + Flickr.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#32
I have a side project where we spend about $150/month on Amazon Web Services for hosting and $50 on one other SaaS service needed by the product.

Take that with the grain of salt that our total marketing spend is $0. We don't even use Mixpanel or any equivalent to track what our users are doing.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#33
I bought a windows 8 licence, but that has no expiration date so I don't think it can be converted into a per month rate. Other than that I have a domain which is hosted for $20 annually. So while server software and domain can probably count as Saas but the (part of the (VPS)) server itself cannot be saas I guess. That's pretty much it.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#36

Till the whole NSA thing came out I was spending around $200-$300 for several services. After that I switched to a local server and FOSS alternatives to Dropbox, Github & co. Now my SaaS spending is $0 or $10 depending on if you count Spotify as SaaS.

What do you use as a Dropbox alternative?

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#38
Roughly about $10k a month, though we have cut that down from $30k a month. There are still plenty of cost savings we can make though so I expect that to drop to about half that still, with no loss of capacity, scale or performance.

The simple fact is we couldn't do what we do by purchasing hardware, its so much more cost effective at this scale. Mostly AWS with Cloudant and bits of Rackspace as well as a few smaller suppliers.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#39

Till the whole NSA thing came out I was spending around $200-$300 for several services. After that I switched to a local server and FOSS alternatives to Dropbox, Github & co. Now my SaaS spending is $0 or $10 depending on if you count Spotify as SaaS.

What do you use as a Dropbox alternative?

I would recommend BitTorrent Sync [1] for personal usage.

[1] - http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#40
olark, zendesk, zoho, webex, ringcentral, a couple other minor ones all add up to over $2k/month. this is like a drop in the bucket compared to payroll and rent and colo and equipment which are each well into in the 5 figures/month.

if you're running a business you will have to get accustomed to spending large amounts of money and not let it spook you.

just make sure your per-seat software costs are reasonable and it will track linearly and profitably with your success.

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