I use a bunch of different tools for https://pdf2qrcode.com but I'd like to highlight papercups.io for pre-sale chat/questions. Otherwise, stripe for payments and cloudflare.
Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
31–40 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#32Big fan of using DigitalOcean droplets instead of AWS for hosting simple backend APIs. A few perks:
- Fixed pricing, very predictable billing
- No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances
- Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet
I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database. A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for, especially when combined with a SPA that offloads much of the processing to the users' browser.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#33I'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…
Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#34I'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…
If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53?
Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings.
Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#35I'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…
+1 for avoiding SendGrid. We haven't had this problem at work. But we have persistently hit a bug where if you send them two API requests at the same time they will return a spurious 403 error for one of them. They seem unwilling to fix it (reports go back years). We currently have a retry with random timeout configured in our system to compensate for it.
I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#36I'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…
If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53? Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings. Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection. Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#37I'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…
If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53? Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings. Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
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 host and point the domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the domains and hosts the DNS.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#38Big fan of using DigitalOcean droplets instead of AWS for hosting simple backend APIs. A few perks: - Fixed pricing, very predictable billing - No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances - Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database. A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for,…
DO is awesome but the UI has been degrading constantly.
Why the hell does DO need to change their UI so often? There are so many bugs to fix. Stop reskinning it please.
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#39Personally: - Google Cloud Run (or anything that can run docker) - SendGrid (but use SMTP only for easy migration) - Google Workspace (Office/Notion are also cool but I just don't use them often) - Mainly Go with Python for scripts - PostgreSQL - gRPC/Protocol Buffers for API servers Where possible I try and take on as few dependencies on big cloud services, and always use standard gateways. It makes moving around mu…
IndieHackers looks great. How can I get an invite code?
Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
#40- Zapier - Notion - HockeyStack - Drip - GPT-3 - Apollo.io I would suggest learning how to do marketing, writing down an excruciatingly detailed process (on Notion), and then automating a part of it while delegating the rest to freelancers. Though, to delegate as much as possible, you will need a good amount of capital.
Interesting list. Would you be willing to add in edits on what you use each one for? For example, Zapier "moves things between web apps." Is that an ETL as a service? What is it E'ing, T'ing and L'ing, though?
Zapier is useful for integrating common tools (slack, drive, asana, etc etc) but would not be a good choice for most nontrivial ETL, or nontrivial any kind of integration.
Eg, you want a slack notification when a Google form is filled out. Pretty painless to set up a zap.
You want to keep a database table up to date with a Google sheet. You can do it on zapier, but it's gonna be a pain.