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Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

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31–40 of 142 posts

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#32
post #19

If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is. https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...

Dokku is a great self-hosted alternative as well.

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#34

Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?! I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable. This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen. When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong. Is it unreasonable…

Agreed.

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#35

I would be interested to hear why you use Sendgrid and Klaviyo? Is that just legacy transaction emails or are there features you can't accomplish with one or the other?

I use Klaviyo to send a weekly newsletter to my lists, drip sequence after signup, or one-off marketing emails.

I use SendGrid for when users sign up, reset password, etc.

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#36
post #19

If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is. https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...

I'd like to switch platforms but I'm SO fast and comfortable with Heroku. Change costs for me might be high. I'd rather spend time on marketing / features that could get me 3 more customers/month to make up for it... I learned Heroku at my coding boot camp and they have made thousands of $$ off of me since...

Agreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business. The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#38

@patwalls a note regarding Sendgrid. As a user of their free tier (for a freelance job) I was recently bitten by a shared IP that was put on a block list, probably due to abuse by another Sendgrid user. Support does not migrate accounts on the shared IP pool to another IP, basically leaving me unable to send email for days. Might be worth upgrading to their Pro plan ($90/mo). This gets you your own dedicated IP so th…

I’m using Mailgun on the free plan with some small orgs, got bit by the shared ip thing.

A quick note to their support and they switched the free plan to a new ip. Zero hassle.

Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business

#40

   Upwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers.
  I especially use Upwork because I don't have
  to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc.

The same for me, and they take a cut both sides (3% or 50 USD / month + 3% fees USD/EUR on my side and 5 to 10% on the freelancer side). I was wondering if there was an alternative to upwork for those who only need it for its automatic billing system + time tracking + weekly summary + screenshots of work (don't need to research for new talents).

I guess time tracking tool could enter this market

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