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SaaS We Happily Pay For

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Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#51

Post by majkinetor »

sagivo wrote: post #27
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…

How much time will you spend writing custom solutions? Why would you focus on anything other than your core businesses? Why would you want to maintain servers and OSS that has nothing to do with your core businesses? I don't think doing everything yourself just to save $200/month always pays off.

Because your tech solution is not NOT YOUR business - its one aspect of it, and customized solution may instead of cloud one give you higher efficiency as it is tailored specifically to your needs, plus durability as you totally control it. Cost is totally not important in that regard.

Cost of cloud solution is not comparable to cost of employee - employees build what you want, while on cloud you adapt to the solutions offered and also have to do additional cloud-related duties not relevant to your problem scope (so you payed also for the stuff you don't need).

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#53

Post by jedberg »

> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration.

This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.

After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#54

Post by jariel »

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…

This is questionable advice.

1) Any SaaS that actually provides values is probably worth 10-100x what it costs.

Of course, it doesn't mean they all provide value.

There's a mistake in your comment ('we stopped using them and didn't miss them') which is the assumption that SaaS doesn't provide value, which is obviously not the case.

Good tech is an amplifier - that's why it exists.

You're telling the farmer don't spend money on fancy tractors, toil the land with a sickle.

For every $ you spend, the idea is that you are generating ROI, ergo, you want to spend more.

If this 4-person team is hauling in $400K/year it's precisely because of those tools, without which they literally might not be able to do it.

So the advice there should be:

"Don't use the things that don't help, definitely use the things that do"

2) The mindset of 'FOSS is Free' is completely wrong.

Every tech has a 'total cost of ownership' and if you have to spend any time at all installing, fussing with, maintaining it - it's probably worth paying for a SaaS.

$5/month is literally 5 minutes of an employees time.

Think about that: if the SaaS saves you 5 minutes - it's worth it - OR - if the FOSS takes more than 5 minutes a month in over head, it's not worth it.

One of the many reasons that Windows dominates Linux (it's more complicated obviously) - is that Windows is somewhat easier to use and support out of the box. So if Windows saves a single support issue per year, per user - then it's worth it.

3) Data Ownership - like everything, the pragmatic reality of the situation matters more than ideology.

So many factors: security, integrity of host, does the data have 'long term value' (do you need granular data from 5 years ago?).

Do you really think that your home-baked file server in the corner hosting your shared documents is more secure, supportable, maintainable, lower cost than the SaaS?

Maybe - but probably not.

Summary: invest in things that are materially useful to your operations, and if they do 'help' they are probably worth quite a lot but have the self awareness to not get addicted to 'distracting' SaaS, and make pragmatic decisions about what data will sit in the cloud and why, and finally you can still push vendors to provide more 'controlled' data scenarios, such as co-locating services that they run etc.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#55

Post by systemvoltage »

jedberg wrote: post #53

> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration. This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments. After that incident, the com…

Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#56

Post by paxys »

ryanSrich wrote: post #19
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.

If you are a 3-person SaaS startup and your team is spending 15+ minutes a day just scheduling meetings among themselves, and need additional software just to manage that process, I'd say that's a problem in itself.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#57

Post by ceejayoz »

systemvoltage wrote: post #55
jedberg wrote: post #53

> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration. This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments. After that incident, the com…

Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?

I would imagine most Netflix employees were already going to get a Netflix subscription. Setting that up so the company gets some extra QA out of that hardly sounds like a bad idea.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#58

Post by Drdrdrq »

systemvoltage wrote: post #55
jedberg wrote: post #53

> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration. This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments. After that incident, the com…

Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?

Automated tests rule, but nothing beats end to end tests, not to even mention that they are also eating their own dogfood. Awesome solution, gp, thanks for sharing!

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#59

Post by [deleted] »

systemvoltage wrote: post #55
jedberg wrote: post #53

> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration. This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments. After that incident, the com…

Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?

[deleted]

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#60

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Overruse of subscriptions is like creating unnecessary dependencies. Eventually this transitions to a state that is incompatible with qualities such as small, fast, portable.
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