I was thinking man - they don’t even have 1 really expensive SaaS product on the list… $60k for all those solutions seems very very cheap. Just setting up an open-source alternative to something that costs <$500/yr probably ends up costing you more - without upgrades and management.
How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#12That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount. I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full con…
$60k/year is 1/3 to 1/2 a developer/sysadmin. If maintaining in-house systems based on open source equivalents of all of those packages would take more than 1/2 a headcount, then they are making the right choice.
And even if they could do it all in-house, that's a developer who's not working on the stuff that makes their product distinctive. Running your own email sending / file sharing / customer support tracking / project management / sales lead management software has a massive opportunity cost.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#13That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount. I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full con…
Heck, there are paid, commercial software suites that are far, far, far, cheaper than this.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#14While interesting - there's often a free or opensource alternative for these "generic" SaaS services. You'd probably be spending just as much on this list if you used no SaaS products and hired an engineer to either maintain the open source versions or add similar custom functionality to your product/CMS/dashboard/somewhere. If you hired the engineer, you'd probably get the exact functionality you needed too.
We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product. Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but…
And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes.
I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. At <30 people, all you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#15I wonder how many of those service are at a "just in case" level? I see a number of products I have/do use, but the team only needed a smaller version of. (for instance, $97 for Github when a $25 org plan would work)
Since we run two products (both Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards), we end up paying twice for some services like Github.
I don't understand why you would host your source code externally?
You can buy Atlassian Stash, once, for $1800/25 users, and use it forever: https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#16That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount. I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full con…
$60k/year is 1/3 to 1/2 a developer/sysadmin. If maintaining in-house systems based on open source equivalents of all of those packages would take more than 1/2 a headcount, then they are making the right choice. And even if they could do it all in-house, that's a developer who's not working on the stuff that makes their product distinctive. Running your own email sending / file sharing / customer support tracking /…
yes that's the tradeoff/investment, where people differ of opinion and I (very technical person, not management/paper pusher), find it more important to have in-house capabilities (even at higher cost) then to simply rely on a third party vendor.
Plus that you are not making any third party aware of anything, as you don't need them. And might save you a lot of hassle in the middle of the night and you need vendor support, which generally at such hours could generate even more cost.
In my humble opinion, technical pov, the more you do in-house, and the less you rely on third parties, the more freedom the company has.
Also any in-house developed product, could be sold, generating income. Also, i believe, that developing your own, gives you a certain knowledge which you don't get if you are simply adopting third party software.
It's of course way easier/more clear to calculate ROI when you spending specific amounts instead of investing in knowledge, control and self power. The returns on that can very a lot.
But, generally speaking, things are only 'expensive' if you think they are not worth it.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product. Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but…
And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes. I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a…
> IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since we run two products (both Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards), we end up paying twice for some services like Github.
I don't understand why you would host your source code externally? You can buy Atlassian Stash, once, for $1800/25 users, and use it forever: https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing
A lot of companies end up going with something similar to this, since Github Enterprise costs get a little crazy. Stash is good, but if one is looking for an even lower cost option, a lot of people recommend Gitlab now-days.
However for some, the task of self-hosting is daunting. I presume that is why some are willing to pay a lot for a hosted solution.
BTW -- It's worth noting -- BitBucket is run by Atlassian and allows unlimited free private repos. I think you must pay for teams (EDIT: Free up to 5 users, $10 per month for 10 users, etc, it's basically $1 per user per month over the initial 5 free), but just throwing that out there. It's basically their hosted Stash solution.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes. I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a…
> IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one. Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.
From experience: That level of maintenance only grows to sysadmin proportions at a scale where you can hire a sysadmin.
These systems largely run themselves, indefinitely.
Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
#20I was thinking man - they don’t even have 1 really expensive SaaS product on the list… $60k for all those solutions seems very very cheap. Just setting up an open-source alternative to something that costs <$500/yr probably ends up costing you more - without upgrades and management.
I saw the setup of a ticket system (with some tayloring, server and user setup, etc.) quoted at 20k EUR, which I found a reasonable price.
That's 20k upfront investment _before anyone has used it_. And this is where the real value of SaaS lies.
If I throw away 1000 EUR in seat licensing just for finding out a system seemed nice but doesn't work in the long run, I just saved 19000 EUR.