Launch HN: Taloflow (YC W21) – Find the top cloud or dev tools for your use case

Thanks!

We're currently experimenting with pricing (charging retainer or SaaS fees for advanced/ongoing analysis) but think we can keep referrals vendor-agnostic by standardizing referral rates and aligning incentives in a way where we get a small percentage over a long time period of usage. We're trying to optimize for long-term satisfaction and usage of a product so only want to be rewarded when we can fulfill that.

Also we'll always give a transparent reason for why each vendor was recommended or excluded based on your use case requirements (this vendor doesn't fit your compliance or cost requirements, this vendor has low average ease-of-use rating and you said ease of use was a high priority for you, etc).

In terms of keeping track of every product, feature, release - it's currently being done in a combination of monitoring tools for public docs, websites, and releases and in some cases we will directly communicate with the vendor to validate. In the future we're hoping to create a system of record whether that's an API or interface so vendors can push information to us directly (which we will then vet for accuracy) to keep things accurate and up to date. Eventually we want to help standardize terminology, and potentially even standardize some benchmarks so developers can view features and performance in a more uniform way.

It would be valuable just to tell people what others are using. The most popular configurations would lead to suggestions based on usage in the field.

This is sort of the reason people check out state of Javascript and learn that "everyone else" is gravitating towards Vue, or that Svelte is gaining in popularity, or that VS code is everyone's preferred editor.

How would one go about building such a product though? Comparing hardware features (say iPhone with Samsung for example) is a lot easier than software, isn't it? SaaS products can release features every week, it would be quite hard to keep up.

It would be cool if there is a JSON standard to publish features (and pricing) for SaaS apps - something like what AWS does for its products. Defining such a standard itself would be tricky, but it is worth trying. It might make it a bit easier to compare various project management apps, for example.

I think you're solving a problem that is becoming increasingly critical for many businesses. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are so enterprise focused that startups to mid-level businesses are getting killed once their storage credits run out and they have to pay full enterprise prices. Finding alternatives is a painful process of trial and error. Having a trusted recommendation engine would go a long way towards relieving that pain point. Good luck!

Neat! I often find myself cross-referencing dozens of blogs, HN and Reddit articles to figure out all the little critical differences between products. Particularly in deployment & machine learning related software it's often hard to discern what the solutions actually provide beneath all the buzzwords on the landing page.

PS: The "Guide -> Select a category" page gives me some errors and requires a few reloads to work properly. I get: "Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://app.papercups.io/socket/websocket?vsn=2.0.0." (probably unrelated) "Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://o454487.ingest.sentry.io/api/5636106/envelope/?sentr.... (Reason: CORS request did not succeed)" (also probably unrelated, but means you probably won't have this particular problem logged)