41–50 of 58 posts
Till the whole NSA thing came out I was spending around $200-$300 for several services. After that I switched to a local server and FOSS alternatives to Dropbox, Github & co. Now my SaaS spending is $0 or $10 depending on if you count Spotify as SaaS.
What do you use as a Dropbox alternative?
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. Send…
We do outsource various infrastructure things to specialists. Hosting and payment collection are the two largest categories.
However, our experience has been that every time we've considered SaaS, it comes down to a balance something like this:
Pros:
- Saves time.
- Offers a tried and tested solution to some problem.
Cons:
- Requires effort up-front to integrate it.
- Requires effort up-front to customize it to fit our needs as well as it can.
- Such customization isn't always possible.
- We're allergic to lock-in, and we've seen goalposts moved after our money has been taken in the past.
- May have deal-breaking privacy/security implications.
- Has ongoing costs, which may or may not scale favourably as we grow.
The only areas that tip towards SaaS on that balance for any of our projects tend to be very simple tasks that require negligible effort to integrate or customize, involve no data that is highly sensitive or valuable, and are expendable without causing noticeable harm to our business while we make other arrangements. In other words, they're things where the cons don't really apply because it's not big or important enough to worry about them. Most of those are readily available as someone's free plan anyway at the kinds of scales we're talking about here.
For anything more important than that, we've found that doing things manually at first soon shows up which areas will most benefit from automation for any given project, and we tend to automate heavily once a need becomes clear. We just do it the old-fashioned way using scripting, spreadsheets, and various other software tools that have proven helpful.
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. Send…
how reliable has workless been for you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I just checked out tarsnap. It's $0.30/gb/month. I currently do a backup to S3 which is a fraction of the price. I wouldn't mind having another cloud service. Why did you choose tarsnap if it's so expensive.
Bitbucket: Free with 29 private repositories.
GitHub: Maybe $7 in the future. I would like to test my product against their enterprise version and $7 is the cost to join the developer program but they don't say you are are guaranteed a test license. Obviously if I can't get a test license, it doesn't make sense to pay for a plan.
DigitalOcean: $15 - $50. I really see them as a cheap download service for my products installer which is 225MB. It's basically $5 for 1 TB. This sounds like a good deal, but if somebody could correct me, I would love to know.
Stripe: $0 because my product is in beta and is free.
Google Business Email: $50/year
For everything else, I can do on my own.
SIDE NOTE
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I would like to test my OS X installer on as many different versions as I can, so I'm wondering is their a VPS service for OS X?
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. Send…
Windows Azure Google Apps GitHub Dropbox Evernote
A little over $1000 per month. I recently did a write up of everything we use here: http://projectidealism.com/posts/2013/12/30/saas-we-use-2013
So I continued to pay the $100/mo with no real income coming in, just to host my own site plus a few others for a few local businesses that I didn't really have the heart to pull the plug on (since I was working, it wasn't too big of an issue for me).
Once I started selling my software on my site in August 2010, I would say in that first month I more or less broke even for the first time in forever and the income rate has remained fairly constant since then (about $200-300/mo).
Current expenses are: $100 - Rackspace Cloud Sites (I'm locked into the old pricing...now it's $150/mo) $6 - AVLUX Subversion Hosting $7 - GitHub Plan $1 and change for Sendgrid's Lite Plan Plus the occasional renewal costs for one of the domains I have.