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Running Costs of a SaaS app

cushionapp.com

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Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#101

Post by jasonkester »

iampims wrote: post #99
jmduke wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation isn't just a choice where you snap your fingers and it's done. Automation takes time and effort and adds technical debt and support burden; sometimes these are trivial amounts, sometimes they aren't. I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python. I know I could spend maybe two hours writing a replacement for it…

> I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python. Would you mind sharing which service that is?

I run S3stat, and that's a pretty fair description of the service we provide (for that price). It brings in a nice living from small businesses that can perform the basic arithmetic described above.

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#102

Post by morgante »

patio11 wrote: post #97

Worth noting: costs for people blow costs for software/services out of the water. I was notoriously spendthrift with regards to SaaS services ("gotta catch them all!") and spent ~$3 on people last year for every $1 on services. (And if I had had any FTEs that would have been substantially higher.) Over ~10 years running SaaS apps I generally managed to pretty consistently find ways to spend 40% of revenue. Also worth…

I found it frustrating (but also understandable) that the running costs apparently don't include any personnel when they almost certainly dominate the entire expenses.

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#103

Post by aidos »

stevrodr wrote: post #90
aidos wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else looking into recurring billing I'd highly recommend Chargebee (not affiliated at all). We've tried a few different solutions and were a little apprehensive at first because it looked a bit clunky but it's actually one of the best bits of software I've used. You don't realise the number of features a subscription billing platform needs until you use something like chargebee and discover how wonderful i…

Oh wow, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing!

Glad to have helped! I discovered them when trying to find a solution for the insane EU Vat regulations (which they handle gracefully).

We've been with them through a big few tasks now (like when they added Xero integration - which is also an amazing feature) and if there's any confusion with mapping data or whatever they'll always jump on a video call to make sure everyone is 100% clear on what's going on.

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#105

Post by Shpigford »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #8
destroytoday wrote: post #2

:waves: Hi, I'm the founder of Cushion. I'd be happy to answer any questions about our running costs or transparency. (Thanks for posting, @Sujan!)

Great stuff!destroytoday! Regarding Heap Analytics, their pricing model is quite confusing. I'd like to know how many users/visitors to your website are you getting that allows it to be free. To you, is the almost $5k you're spending on Intercom worth it? How much does it come to per user? You moved away from Baremetrics to Chartmogul, something with not as good a design. Why?

Heyo! Founder of Baremetrics here.

Wanted to touch on a couple of things in this sub-thread on Baremetrics.

It means a lot that literally _anyone_ has ever used Baremetrics. I started it over 3 years ago to scratch my own itch and hot dog it kinda took off. So, I'm grateful...certainly for the nearly 700 happy paying customers, but also for the others over the years who's experiences were less than stellar.

We've had some growing pains, but the majority of the painful ones are far in the past.

I did want to address the specific things folks brought up here, just to clear the air.

* Regarding changing our pricing "a lot"...we've changed pricing just once in 3 years. And that was based directly on customer feedback.

* Regarding us being "notoriously slow for the past 2 years"... We had some temporary scaling problems over a year ago, but that's just not the case any more. We've got a whole suite of server monitoring tools that show we have, in fact, not been "notoriously slow for 2 years".

* Regarding us being "inexperienced"...busted! I've never built a complex analytics platform storing and processing in near real-time terabytes of data! ;) Every single entrepreneur is winging it. You'll make some good decisions and some bad ones. That's life. :) But to be clear our team is very equipped and extremely talented. We're just solving a complicated problem...much more complicated than anyone who's never built this sort of thing before realizes.

At the end of the day, though, there are obviously some people who haven't had the experience they wanted with Baremetrics. I hate that that's the case, but we're constantly improving and innovating...most of the time for the better.

If anyone has had a less-than-positive experience with Baremetrics, please email me. I'd love to chat: josh@baremetrics.com

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#106

Post by destroytoday »

wwalser wrote: post #98
destroytoday wrote: post #2

:waves: Hi, I'm the founder of Cushion. I'd be happy to answer any questions about our running costs or transparency. (Thanks for posting, @Sujan!)

Thus far legal has been one my most significant cost (incorporation + NY qualification). Perhaps I'm doing it wrong -_-. What do your numbers there look like?

Fortunately, I was able to find a really great lawyer who is actually affordable (previously interviewed a few law firms who were $700+/hr). Besides incorporating, legal costs haven't been too high. Just the occasional contract here or there, or updating our terms.

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#107

Post by destroytoday »

cobookman wrote: post #79
destroytoday wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've thought about it, but Cushion is incredibly lightweight and doesn't need to be used constantly, so our load is very low. We've only needed 2 dynos since we launched and we're nowhere close to needing more than that. As much as I'd like to lower the cost, they truly take so much weight off our shoulders. I gladly pay what we're paying now, so it's not an issue for us.

Have you looked into Appengine Flex. Appengine flex is a PaaS like heroku, and will scale up any docker container. Its a great solution for your early days, and when you do need to move to a 1000+ node cluster its easy to switch from Appengine Flex to kubernetes. You also might get a lot of free startup credits https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ (Disclaimer, I work for Google). [1] https://cloud.google.com…

I haven't, but I'll check it out. Seems like it's still beta? (says not to use in production)

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#108

Post by destroytoday »

AtheistOfFail wrote: post #65
destroytoday wrote: post #2

:waves: Hi, I'm the founder of Cushion. I'd be happy to answer any questions about our running costs or transparency. (Thanks for posting, @Sujan!)

Why don't you guys use the new Heroku beta SSL feature so you can bank that extra $20 a month? It's not much but it makes a difference if you're spinning multiple sites up. https://blog.heroku.com/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_...

We would, but unfortunately, we need their "old" SSL add-on to get SSL to work with the root URL of our invoice url, in.vc. Apparently, the new SSL doesn’t work the same.

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#109

Post by destroytoday »

pccampbell wrote: post #77
destroytoday wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, okay—I browsed the website and couldn't find anything about a paid tier. nod

Hola! Patrick here - Founder of PriceIntel/ProfitWell. Why ProfitWell is free is actually a longer story, but the short answer is we discovered we could monetize more effectively (and efficiently) by giving away the metrics for free (while still being the only one on the market that's 100% accurate) and then selling add-ons like Retain (kills your delinquent churn), Recognized (Revenue Recognition), etc. Here's our p…

Crap—I'm one of those people who didn't scroll. :( I hate when that happens. My b.

Thanks for the info!

Re: Running Costs of a SaaS app

#110

Post by destroytoday »

codeisawesome wrote: post #92
destroytoday wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s less about distinguishing the app with another font and more about designing the app with what I had in mind—the system fonts and more affordable fonts didn’t feel right to me. Even though I consider myself more of a developer, I went to school for design and it’s a big part of my work, so the look and feel is just as important to me as whether the app works or not. Sure, we could’ve saved $500, but I wouldn’t e…

The website looks wonderful, and considering just how much text you need to use to get ideas across, the font money seems well spent. The entire page looks... delicious.

Thanks!
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