at https://www.oomnis.com (small startup), we mostly use Zoho One.
One solution that does: CRM, cloud storage, docs, digital signature for contracts, book-keeping, password managers, marketing automation, support website, website hosting, remote assistance, chat, web conferencing, subscription management and more. Pricing is per employee which is GREAT for a 1-3 people startup.
Apart from that, we deploy on Azure VMs. Would love to know what solutions people deploy to host/monitor/alert with monolithic apps on Azure.
Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
91–100 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#92I'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…
I would like to add [Sentry](https://sentry.io/) to the list. Helps identify the issues your customers have with SaaS and produce better code with a piece of mind.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#93at https://www.oomnis.com (small startup), we mostly use Zoho One. One solution that does: CRM, cloud storage, docs, digital signature for contracts, book-keeping, password managers, marketing automation, support website, website hosting, remote assistance, chat, web conferencing, subscription management and more. Pricing is per employee which is GREAT for a 1-3 people startup. Apart from that, we deploy on Azure VMs…
I second Zoho One.
Prior to about 6 months ago, I had used Salesforce for almost ten years. I was a big fan of it, but the cost and complexity for a small business became too much.
I switched to Zoho One and use it to single handedly run an IT Services small business with $500k+ ARR.
Out of the box it is capable enough, but over time, Ive been able to make even more improvements.
I have integrations setup via web hooks/built in integrations, leads automatically created upon contact submissions to website, proposals/contracts generated via templates and mail merge, send docs for signature, etc.
I’ve even automated parts that require non-user actions traditionally handled via typing the same email over and over again (e.g., sending invoice information to accounting).
To do many of the things I described in Salesforce, it would have taken me significantly more time and cost much more money. Salesforce has a minimum user license requirement, as well as a requirement for annual contracts. Zoho allows for month-to-month and has no minimum.
I almost feel like a shill for it now, so I’ll stop. However, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more. 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another…
Probably not a good enough benefit in the age of letsencrypt but you do get free certs if you're with R53.
Not to mention the dynamic alias records, automated certificate validations and auto-renewing, and the very excellent integrations with other AWS services.
People like making life harder for themselves /shrug
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Mixpanel is super expensive. 2. Mixpanel is slow as a hell in a real world apps. I'm not joking. You can wait by 15 seconds to load one page. 3. Amplitude is 10 times more flexible and intuitive. 4. Amplitude is free completely. 100 000 000 events included. Mixpanel gives about 5000, maybe a bit more, just for testing purposes.
That's outrageously wrong. Free Plans Monthly: Amplitude: 10 million events Mixpanel: 100k tracked users with 1000 events each. aka 100 million tracked events. https://amplitude.com/pricing https://mixpanel.com/pricing/
Looks like I'm wrong. They changed pricing and limits.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#96I 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…
I am thinking about creating my own SaaS. Do you happen to have an invite?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#97Earlier 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…
Spreedly as a wrapper around other payment gateways may add additional fees. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more. 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another…
Probably not a good enough benefit in the age of letsencrypt but you do get free certs if you're with R53.
You can use ACM for free without Route 53, it just takes manual effort to set up verification records.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#99For PlotAPI ( https://plotapi.com ) I’m using: - FastAPI for the SaaS itself - WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions - Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations - FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK) I’ve been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It’s looking great so far for content and subscription management.
Hi thanks for sharing. Can you please explain what Nikola is? I tried searching for it, but it's a common name.
Might be this static site generator: https://getnikola.com/
Found it by searching [nikola software].
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#100I'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…
I also recommend against SendGrid.
The first major issue we had was when emails sent to comcast.net addresses were bouncing. We were told that it was a known issue and that SendGrid was working on it. If SendGrid knew about this issue, why didn't anyone at SendGrid contact us proactively about the situation? We learned about the issue from unsatisfied customers who had not received order confirmations. To make matters worse, we never received a follow-up email informing us that the issue had been resolved. The lack of communication was unacceptable, especially given the man-hours that SendGrid allocates to the dissemination of fluff on Twitter (e.g., "Some sweet demos today from last night's hackathon").
The second major issue was even worse. Our latest invoice failed to be paid automatically for some undisclosed reason, and we didn't receive any notification regarding the issue. Again, we learned about a SendGrid issue from unsatisfied customers. To make matters worse (there's that phrase again), our customer service email address was added to the hard bounce list after our automatic payment failed. So after we manually paid our invoice, we still didn't receive emails sent to our customer service email address from our site's contact form.