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SaaS We Happily Pay For

francescodilorenzo.com

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Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#11

Post by frankdilo »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now! I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method. I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, f…

That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything.

We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution.

But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage.

As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible.

[1]: https://mailbrew.com

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#12

Post by forgotmypw17 »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now! I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method. I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, f…

One could look, at it as a form of dogfooding, in the broader sense of the indie SaaS ecosystem they're helping build.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#13

Post by cabraca »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now! I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method. I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, f…

~$200/month for a 3 person startup might seem high. now calculate the cost of a server to host that FOSS stuff and the time and energy to maintain it, backups, etc.

TBH i would rather put that time and energy in my startup instead of maintaining a FOSS stack for my company.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#15

Post by haburka »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now! I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method. I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, f…

Considering that the effective salary of 1 person/mo would be around ~15k, I think spending $200 to make people more efficient is absolutely worth it

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#16

Post by osamagirl69 »

I am not a big fan of SaaA products, and $500/mo seems like a lot for the utility you are getting, but I just wanted to say I love your site design.

I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup

Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#18

Post by ryanSrich »

SaaS I happily pay for:

- CloudFlare

- Roam

- Slack

- Linear

- Geekbot

SaaS I’m okay with paying for:

- Figma

- Gsuite

- Gusto

- Stripe

- Netlify

SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice:

- AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits)

- Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do)

- Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#19

Post by ryanSrich »

paxys wrote: post #6

SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.

You really can’t say if they can justify it or not. Only they can. If I can save 15 minutes per day, that would more than pay for $12/month. Time is your most valuable asset.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#20

Post by aparsons »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now! I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method. I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, f…

Vercel billing per-user is so head-scratching. I think it's a greedy billing strategy.
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