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SaaS We Happily Pay For

francescodilorenzo.com

61–70 of 229 posts

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir, where do you pay $15k for a startup developer salary?!

I've always heard that, for the US, when thinking about salary you want to about double what the employee makes when considering the employers cost.

This might apply to large organizations with lots of overheads and perks. But it definitely does not apply to startups.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#62
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…

> I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason! This is my complaint too, especially when a "user" is defined in a ridiculous way. GitLab is a good example. Unless you're on the top tier plan, guests are considered users, so if you want to give someone access to a pages site that has authentication, you have to pay as if they're a developer. It's frustrating.

Our "solution" is to have 2 GitLab instances, one CE for projects used by guests, and the other one (paid) for regular users. Infuriating.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#63

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime…

You do realize this reads very much like the infamous Dropbox comment?

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#64
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 know of no payment service provider that offers support for testing that is good for fairly normal 2020 software development processes. The standard seems to be offering one separate sandbox environment along with your production one, which you can use to experiment without literally making charges/refunds/etc, and possibly a set of specific credentials you can use to simulate various outcomes such as a declined card or insufficient funds. I know of none that offers enough for stronger safeguards such as automated integration testing as part of a CI system, nor additional sandbox environments so you can for example test a new integration independently without disrupting your main test/staging system that is integrated with the sandbox you get automatically.

Just to extend the OP's anecdote, we also have someone signed up for real with every payment method we offer, though more recently we've been looking at moving away from these kinds of payment service entirely for this among other reasons.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very curious about why you classified your "okay with" lower than the other ones, especially stripe which literally drives your revenue!

> Figma Figma isn’t very good. It’s better than sketch for prototyping, but not as good for vector. It’s also web based, so it’s painfully slow. I also think it’s a bit expensive. > Gsuite Google is an evil company, but it’s a choice between giving an evil company money, or using a terrible product (O365). I have to focus on the business, not wondering why Outlook isn’t filtering Spam. So Gsuite it is. > Gusto Gusto…

Thanks!

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#66
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…

Even if you presume the FOSS versions were functionally equivalent, there is large cost to rolling your own (admin, backups, debugging). It’s precisely the 3 person teams where SaaS makes most sense. Larger orgs can amortize the relatively fixed cost over a larger user base.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#67

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime…

Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

For Gmail, docs and drive, G Suite is an absolute bargain. The user experience you describe above (committing Libre office files to git? have you used Libre office) makes me shudder.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#68

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime…

Either Gsuite or Office 365 with the Web/mobile apps costs around $5/month/user, and includes Email. Just sayin.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#69
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…

If ~$200/month materially effects your runway, what you're saying is true, but even super duper early stage bootstrapped startups have that kind of cash, in my (admittedly limited) experience.

And it's not like you don't need what these services are providing, you'd just then have to do it yourself, and honestly I'm finding time to be more valuable than money right this very moment in the startup I'm working at...

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#70
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?

What are they really losing there? the stripe fee? they are paying themselves 10 dollars minus the fee... surely it's worth the 60¢/month it costs for absolute certainty that your integrations work for real?
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