1–10 of 23 posts
What tools/services do you currently use? If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Accounting: For analysis/forecasting, a custom programmed dashboard. For bookkeeping, Quickbooks.
Newsletters: MailChimp
Everythign else e-mail: Rackspace Email
Banking: The local bank
IT: If hardware breaks, Softlayer, Linode and Amazon take care of that. Anything else is my job.
Accounting: Quickbooks
Provisioning: Home grown on EC2/GoGrid/Rackspace
Banking: Local bank
Newsletter: AWeber
IT: Depends. Most I handle, but some of the mundane is outsourced.
SCM: HG @ Codebase
If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't obsess as much as I did over the infrastructure. Check and re-check your backup & disaster recovery plan.
Billing: Recurly. Accounting: Quickbooks Provisioning: Home grown on EC2/GoGrid/Rackspace Banking: Local bank Newsletter: AWeber IT: Depends. Most I handle, but some of the mundane is outsourced. SCM: HG @ Codebase If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't obsess as much as I did over the infrastructure. Check and re-check your backup & disaster recovery plan.
Languages: Java backend, AS3 frontend, Python + Ruby misc
Note that we're very new (and hiring!), so much of this is still being built out.
Software lifecycle: git for SCM (GitHub as central repo); ant for builds; ivy for dependency management; Bamboo for build automation; Crucible for code review; JIRA for issue tracking; Greenhopper for sprint planning; Vagrant for containerized development environments
Systems infrastructure: AWS (EC2 w/ELB+ASG and S3 for now, more services to come); nginx-fronted Tomcat for JVM; Cassandra for persistent DB; chef for configuration management (currently chef-solo, but evaluating Opscode Platform); PoolParty+Fabric for one-click deploy server fleets; Nagios + Pingdom for monitoring; Mixpanel + Kontagent for analytics; Dynect (likely) for DNS, possibly for GSLB; Akamai (likely) for CDN, possibly for GSLB
Misc: PagerDuty for on-call stuff; Google Apps for email, shared docs, etc; Confluence for wiki; OpenFire (Jabber) for chat
Billing: Recurly. Accounting: Quickbooks Provisioning: Home grown on EC2/GoGrid/Rackspace Banking: Local bank Newsletter: AWeber IT: Depends. Most I handle, but some of the mundane is outsourced. SCM: HG @ Codebase If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't obsess as much as I did over the infrastructure. Check and re-check your backup & disaster recovery plan.
Is Recurly worth it? One of their team just sent me an email suggesting I check 'em out.
They pulled a massive bait-and-switch on their first users. Overnight, without notice, they changed their long time published pricing from pay-as-you-go (fee per transaction) to high monthly fees. For many, the cost was orders of magnitude higher. They arbitrarily decided the API would only remain accessible if you bought the highest priced plan.
It'd be fine if they gave notice of the change or grandfathered people in, but at least initially, they didn't. They just wrote condescending, insulting blog posts telling us all how we should appreciate their rate hikes. If you weren't happy with (or able to pay) the higher prices and had already integrated Recurly with your site, you were essentially held hostage. They have all your customer billing information, not you. If you want to keep billing customers, your revenue!, while you strip out Recurly and implement some other payment system and get all your users to sign up again, you've gotta pay to keep your account open in the meantime.
Eventually they figured out that screwing with their users like this wasn't a good idea after all, backtracked and came up with a new pricing scheme more like the original, but it's really too late at that point. Revenue is what makes a business. You don't play games with who you trust that to. And nobody should ever trust it to Recurly, since they're more than willing to play games with you.
If you want to outsource subscription management, check out Spreedly and Chargify. They've proven themselves more trustworthy than Recurly by far. Really, I recommend doing it yourself though, it's not that bad. PayPal subscriptions and IPN can take you a long way with minimal coding.
Billing: Recurly. Accounting: Quickbooks Provisioning: Home grown on EC2/GoGrid/Rackspace Banking: Local bank Newsletter: AWeber IT: Depends. Most I handle, but some of the mundane is outsourced. SCM: HG @ Codebase If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't obsess as much as I did over the infrastructure. Check and re-check your backup & disaster recovery plan.
Is Recurly worth it? One of their team just sent me an email suggesting I check 'em out.
I'd also suggest Chargify and Braintree.
I use Google Wave for most in-project communications.
Python/Django + jquery for dev.
WebFaction for web hosting <--- Opportunity here, there's definitely an opportunity to make simpler hosting for Django site. I believe there are people working on it already, though.