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Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

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Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#41

Post by make_it_sure »

dangrossman wrote: post #7
JBlue42 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like Stripe?

1. Stripe didn't exist 20 years ago. A merchant account was how you accepted credit cards online before Stripe. 2. Stripe costs more. I pay "interchange plus" which means a small markup over what Visa/MC/Amex charge to processors. A debit card can cost as little as 0.05% to charge, but Stripe will charge you 2.9%. 3. If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. Spreedl…

3. it won't work quite like that. you'll get tons of failed payments, probably majority of them

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#42

Post by iamstupidsimple »

blopker wrote: post #39
iamstupidsimple wrote: post #25

Personally: - Google Cloud Run (or anything that can run docker) - SendGrid (but use SMTP only for easy migration) - Google Workspace (Office/Notion are also cool but I just don't use them often) - Mainly Go with Python for scripts - PostgreSQL - gRPC/Protocol Buffers for API servers Where possible I try and take on as few dependencies on big cloud services, and always use standard gateways. It makes moving around mu…

IndieHackers looks great. How can I get an invite code?

Ah, that must be new. I'd give you a code but I want this account to stay pseudonymous and don't know how I could share. Please do ask around here though.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#43

Post by dangrossman »

make_it_sure wrote: post #41
dangrossman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Stripe didn't exist 20 years ago. A merchant account was how you accepted credit cards online before Stripe. 2. Stripe costs more. I pay "interchange plus" which means a small markup over what Visa/MC/Amex charge to processors. A debit card can cost as little as 0.05% to charge, but Stripe will charge you 2.9%. 3. If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. Spreedl…

3. it won't work quite like that. you'll get tons of failed payments, probably majority of them

My gateway has outages a few times a year, and I have switched to backup gateways including Stripe on those days with no issues.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#44

Post by rawoke083600 »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #33
rawoke083600 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to…

Was your service or emails against their terms of use?

>Was your service or emails against their terms of use?

a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com).

b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all.

Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one.

It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/

Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused !

We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal.

For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#46

Post by rawoke083600 »

nicoburns wrote: post #35
rawoke083600 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to…

+1 for avoiding SendGrid. We haven't had this problem at work. But we have persistently hit a bug where if you send them two API requests at the same time they will return a spurious 403 error for one of them. They seem unwilling to fix it (reports go back years). We currently have a retry with random timeout configured in our system to compensate for it. I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.

Yo ! Ja definitely getting a anti-customer/customer-is-always-wrong vibe !

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#47

Post by rawoke083600 »

ianberdin wrote: post #17

I do this things for 10 years. Right from the start of commercial development. I suggest to read SEO books and use this as a main source of customers as I do. You will get what you want: better focus on the product. - Crisp (best website chat, email campaigns). - Namecheap. - Cloudflare (speedup website loading around the world). - Postmark (transactional emails). - Uploadcare (come on, save days on image uploading/c…

+1 PostMark !

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#48

Post by cultofmetatron »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #15
dangrossman wrote: post #4

I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life -- almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for: * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting * Rackspace for incoming email * Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email * Namecheap for domains * A merchant account and Spreedly for payments * ShareASale to run an affiliate program and pay a percentage commission for referred sales * Facebook and Google ads All…

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to…

After Donglegate, I had already put them on my blacklist. Now I see that my suspicions that it was just the tip of the iceberg came out to be true.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#49

Post by AlbinoDrought »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #15
dangrossman wrote: post #4

I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life -- almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for: * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting * Rackspace for incoming email * Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email * Namecheap for domains * A merchant account and Spreedly for payments * ShareASale to run an affiliate program and pay a percentage commission for referred sales * Facebook and Google ads All…

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to…

In my experience, the shared SendGrid IPs have poor sender reputation too. Many bounced transactional emails because of blocklists.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#50

Post by blopker »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #42
blopker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IndieHackers looks great. How can I get an invite code?

Ah, that must be new. I'd give you a code but I want this account to stay pseudonymous and don't know how I could share. Please do ask around here though.

That would be amazing, thank you. I've made an anonymous Google form you can send it to me through. It works in incognito, you don't have to log in anything. I don't get any information other than what's typed in the answer: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIusHNqZX-p5lAewZO...
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