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Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

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Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#21

Post by iSloth »

xgarland wrote: post #14
patio11 wrote: post #2

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it. Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc. The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap…

Who are you currently for your telecom services? I'm always surprised about the amount of money businesses spend on their phone system.

Don't forget one of Patio11's products is almost entirely leveraging telecom services for it's functionality: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/

So I doubt he is just talking about a generic office phone when mentioning teleco services.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#22

Post by revelation »

iSloth wrote: post #17

Two servers from OVH is my only expense for side projects, total is around $30/pm Using quite a few free services like Pingdom, Cloudflare, Analytics etc...

That would be IaaS. It's probably too late now, but it would have been interesting had this asked about IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#24

Post by patio11 »

xgarland wrote: post #14
patio11 wrote: post #2

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it. Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc. The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap…

Who are you currently for your telecom services? I'm always surprised about the amount of money businesses spend on their phone system.

Mostly it's Twilio costs. I spend an unconscionable amount on my cell phone bill due to e.g. international roaming or international phone calls for sales/support, but that doesn't even crater the approach to the bridge of what Twilio costs me. (And I rush to say "I'm totally fine with that, and wish I spent 100X as much, because to a first approximation that would imply revenues 100X higher than they are currently.")

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#25

Post by pdb123 »

phpnode wrote: post #10
patio11 wrote: post #2

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it. Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc. The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#27

Post by patio11 »

pdb123 wrote: post #25
phpnode wrote: post #10

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.

Many of us are using Tarsnap for actual businesses, where it is criminally underpriced. Among the many reasons to use it over backing up to S3 is that Tarsnap backups are encrypted and the service is written by a domain-expert in that field. Among many other possible scenarios, I use Tarsnap to back up the MySQL and Redis dumps for Appointment Reminder. These include some data which is covered by BAAs which bind me to restrictions on privacy and security under the HIPAA legislation. Just scp'ing them into S3 would be an automatic compliance failure, where I'd pay $600k or so of fines to save $2 a month on Tarsnap.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

#30

Post by canterburry »

Our Saas, Pixtulate, is currently in beta and bootstrapped. We have optimized for lowest cost possible at the moment and our traffic is still fairly low.

  1. DigitalOcean - $110/month
  2. Google Apps - $5/month
  3. UptimeRobot - Free (just as good as Pingdom)
  4. CloudFlare - Free (serving under 2 TB/month)
  6. Amazon S3 - $1.40/month
  7. MixPanel - Free
  8. HeapAnalytics - Free
  9. Google Analytics - Free
  10. BaseCRM - Free
  11. MailChimp - Free
  12. Mandrill - Free
  13. Tumblr - Free (our blog)
  14. CloudBees - Free (build, maven repos etc)
  15. Desk.com - $3/month
  16. NewRelic - Free (server monitoring)
  17. GoDaddy - $9/year
I am absolutely amazed over how many services we can get free. On one hand, we would either have to invest more into development or do without, on the other, it doesn't bode well for our own likelihood of making money.
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