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How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

blog.sawhorsemedia.com

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Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#41

Post by Argorak »

mattm wrote: post #34
chatmasta wrote: post #24

I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint. I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with al…

Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.

Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#42

Post by Alupis »

corkill wrote: post #36
Alupis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way digging into the details of the Mailchimp spend structure, for instance, is worth the time. Actually that's one point where you are not correct. For a good email campaign, it's imperative that you manage your list. You need to be looking at stats from the previous campaigns and making changes for future campaigns. If you have a lot of low-engaged/no-engaged emails, you need to try to re-engage them a…

They aren't trying to reduce costs, they are trying to focus on their product and growing their company.

That's fine so long as the money flows nice, but if/when things get tougher, they will have to scramble to find a solution.

There's 2 sides to this business -- the technical/development side, and the business side. The business side should very much care about not wasting money unnecessarily, even during the good times.

~~~~~~~

But it's not just about saving money -- the company has almost zero flexibility when using all 3rd party solutions. If a vendor pushes an update tomorrow and it radically changes the product and causes a large disruption (it happens), or a vendor goes under tomorrow, or [insert dooms-day scenario here], the company will be left scrambling.

Using 3rd party services also forces the company to build business routines/practices around their current inflexible environment -- so if they do have to switch vendors at some point, they will have to likely reinvent business routines/practices too. For some companies/services, that is not a problem -- for others, well, some companies have gone under during major core software changes (imagine your warehouse management system having to change suddenly and unexpectedly).

Just like software engineers try to minimize external dependencies unless the dependency is absolutely necessary -- businesses should too.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#43

Post by Argorak »

mmahemoff wrote: post #28

It's significant this is a SaaS company using these services. Some of the services have a cost based on team size, while others have a cost based on user base (and usage volume). Services whose cost is f(team size): CircleCI, Trello, Github Services whose cost is f(user base): MixPanel, Moz, Shopify I mention this distinction because the f(team size) services generally offer solid value to any team, being useful and…

Github (SaaS) is not f(team size), it is f(projects). You can have as many users as you want and the price will stay the same, if you don't cross certain repository thresholds.

Github Enterprise is f(team size)

CircleCI is also f(usage), you can decide to have less capacity. (Although, in the case of CircleCI, more developers hopefully maps to more tests, so indirectly, it is f(team size))

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#44

Post by thebiglebrewski »

mattm wrote: post #34
chatmasta wrote: post #24

I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint. I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with al…

Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.

What we really need: an idea list manager and an endpoint for all of your ideas.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#45

Post by chatmasta »

Argorak wrote: post #41
mattm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.

Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.

Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely wouldn't work as a side project.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#46

Post by Wilya »

It's worth pointing out that, according to their team page [0], Sawhorse Media has zero dedicated backend engineers (apart from maybe their CTO). So, in their case, the alternative would be to hire someone just to manage these things (sysadmin, engineer, or whatever). In this case, I can see why they would make the choice of outsourcing everything.

But if you already have an in-house engineering team who is reasonably competent at maintaining services, the tradeoff is probably different.

[0] http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#47

Post by dkyc »

chatmasta wrote: post #24

I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint. I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with al…

Have been thinking about this for a while with a partner of mine and worked on a prototype, here are some screenshots:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cdbx6e27movkj8q/Contract%20Tags.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/goc2fextcdqb6qn/Contract%20View.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rae05ubbnlgopqi/Add%20Contract.png...

If anyone is interested to chat about this some more, email is in my profile!

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#48

Post by Argorak »

chatmasta wrote: post #45
Argorak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.

Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely would…

If the service just provided "add a user, remove a user (hired, fired) and adjust billing appropriately", it would already be worth a lot and wouldn't need full account access.

Its mind-boggling how many accounts I still have for companies I don't work for anymore.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#49

Post by mattm »

Argorak wrote: post #48
chatmasta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely would…

If the service just provided "add a user, remove a user (hired, fired) and adjust billing appropriately", it would already be worth a lot and wouldn't need full account access. Its mind-boggling how many accounts I still have for companies I don't work for anymore.

Agreed. I recently started work for a new company and they forgot to add me to some services so I needed to request access and then had to wait for them to get to it. A one-click "Add/Remove user for all our services" would be quite valuable in itself. And then the potential cost savings that could come from cancelling/reducing unused SaaS services would make it more valuable.

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#50

Post by mattm »

chatmasta wrote: post #45
Argorak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.

Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely would…

I run a SaaS business which requires pretty much full access to your GMail account (we don't require delete capabilities). Originally, I thought nobody would grant that much access over their email. But it surprised me how many people are willing to do that. Sure, there are some people who are wary and not do it but I think people on HN vastly over estimate the percentage. As you said, Mint is a great counter-example.
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