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

#1

Post by drlaj » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:15 PM UTC

I've recently started working on a side project with a couple of friends, nothing crazy, but we're already spending over $200 a month on supporting services. It's nothing to write home about (yet!) but it was a little surprising.

For those of you who have side projects (or a startup for that matter) and don't mind sharing, how many services are you using and what's your total monthly SaaS spend?

Cheers Luke

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

#2

Post by patio11 » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it.

Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc.

The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap, at $0.60 per month [+]. (Colin, get on the gravy train, you're welcome it it.)

SaaS is a very small portion of my businesses' total expenses. I spend more on hosting and telecomm (largely due to the line of business which is, well, an international telecomm). People are also much more expensive then software, even to the limited extent at which I hire people.

[+] It turns out that a) this had creeped up to $3 per month and b) my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now. grumble grumble picodollars grumble grumble Would happily pay $100 a month to not feel what I'm feeling right now. grumble grumble

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

#3

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#4

Post by hectormalot » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:55 PM UTC

Side project: an automatic roster for evening and weekend emergency duties for groups of dentists. We run on Heroku and most of our saas cost is a dyno ($35), an SSL add-on ($20), and some phone/sms cost from Twilio ($5-10). We use workless to spin up and down a worker dyno when needed.

Since the tool supports an offline process we don't have incredible loads, so we use the free tier of most other services (e.g. SendGrid, etc.)

What are you spending your $200 on?

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

#5

Post by leoplct » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

0$

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

#6

Post by blakesterz » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

These things add up so fast don't they? I think I'm around $200, which is down quite a bit. We had to get rid of New Relic, which broke my heart because it's awesome, and several other things to cut costs. It's all the little things that add up like LastPass, Dropbox, backup space, mail and so on. Sometime the FOSS alternatives aren't worth it, sometimes they are.

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

#7

Post by avanderhoorn » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 3:04 PM UTC

Main work project: Around $500 a month split across 2 services - Mixpanel ($350) and Azure Hosting ($150). Its a 2 man team

Side projects: Around $40 a month split across 2 services - Gtihub, Asana

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

#8

Post by greg5green » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

I'm around $10/month but I've yet to build anything that anyone has taken a shine to (besides myself of course).

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

#9

Post by Brajeshwar » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

Honestly, I believe the pricing model deployed by most Sass product is broken. I know they do experiment and that best clients are the ones willing to pay a premium, and that they are indeed the ones to be taken care of.

However, does it not look more like, get the most from the few?

I don't run or own any Sass Products, so I may be utterly wrong, but won't it not be that there is a gradual increase in price along with multiple options instead of the typical (i) free for the not-so-usable one instance (ii) ~$20 for barely yourself (iii) ~100 for cool and hip but (iv) we're keeping the best for the last at ~$500 (v) of course, the mega corps can email us for to talk about their 10,000th employee.

What about a dynamic pricing where I'm not fleeced at $19 per user per month but more of - it starts with $19 but then to support the next user is rather simple and cost-effective, let is be just $4.99?

As I said, just my thought, I'm yet to experiment with pricing and see them for myself.

As for the questions, I run few side projects and a UI/UX Consulting Service and I'm within $100 per month - from invoicing, to hosting to project management to version control.

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

#10

Post by phpnode » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 3:25 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #2

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it. Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc. The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap…

I also spent around 50 cents / month on tarsnap, at this rate my account credit will last another 7.5 years! Colin your service is great, I would pay orders of magnitude more for it, please increase your price so that I don't have to worry about it going away!