Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SaaS We Happily Pay For

francescodilorenzo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 229 posts

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#71

Post by TameAntelope »

aparsons wrote: post #20
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…

Vercel billing per-user is so head-scratching. I think it's a greedy billing strategy.

There's appears to be a mismatch between their costs and their billing, which either is true and someone will take advantage eventually which will force a restructuring of billing, or it's not actually a mismatch and we're all judging a situation with not enough information.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#72

Post by djxfade »

Silhouette wrote: post #64
systemvoltage wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

In my experience, some (maybe not Stripe) payment vendors sandbox environments acts slightly different, and these minor issues can break things in production. A payment provider I worked with didn't have a proper way of "storing" cards. But you could create a subscription and bill it whenever you wanted. We didn't want to risk that the subscription stopped working, so we hard coded the subscription to be valid until 9999-12-32 (why not?). This worked fine in the sandbox, but when it was pushed out to production, it didn't work at all, because here in Europe, with the SCA that is enforced by the banks, they refused to create subscriptions that exceeded an unknown amount of time.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#73

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #31
ryanSrich wrote: post #18

SaaS I happily pay for: - CloudFlare - Roam - Slack - Linear - Geekbot SaaS I’m okay with paying for: - Figma - Gsuite - Gusto - Stripe - Netlify SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice: - AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits) - Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do) - Wistia (the platform is clunky, but the…

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

[deleted]

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#74

Post by TameAntelope »

systemvoltage wrote: post #49

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…

Your comment seems to echo a fairly common refrain in this submission, that a startup should be miserly with their cash.

What's the disconnect, I wonder? Why is there this belief that an early stage startup should pinch pennies? Am I missing something?

For me, time (to spend building and selling) is substantially (like 2-3x or even higher) more valuable than cash at this stage. Am I undervaluing cash?

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#75

Post by prepend »

jariel wrote: post #54
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 spen…

My issue is that value based pricing sets up incentives against one of the coolest parts of software and digital goods- near zero marginal costs. Software is kind of magical in that once produced it doesn’t cost much to add a second or billionth user. Of course SaaS has more costs, but not nearly as much as the “charge 5% of value” or whatever.

So I think it’s foolish to not buy tractors and till the land by hand, it’s also foolish to think of a hammer as a value add so that the cost should be 5% of the benefit gained by using it instead of some reasonable profit on top of cost. I’ve bought some plumbing tools decades ago that are really useful, they are well made and should last decades more. Saying that I should pay based on value might make sense but isn’t a good user strategy in the long term.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#76

Post by systemvoltage »

TameAntelope wrote: post #74
systemvoltage wrote: post #49

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…

Your comment seems to echo a fairly common refrain in this submission, that a startup should be miserly with their cash. What's the disconnect, I wonder? Why is there this belief that an early stage startup should pinch pennies? Am I missing something? For me, time (to spend building and selling) is substantially (like 2-3x or even higher) more valuable than cash at this stage. Am I undervaluing cash?

If you see value and can afford it, sure go for it. The goal of my comment wasn't to dissuade people from spending on SaaS, but rather to inspire others who don't have the luxury of have extra cash to be not discouraged by articles like this.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#77

Post by systemvoltage »

qeternity wrote: post #67
systemvoltage wrote: post #49

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.

Now that I think of it and other comment said - yea, GSuite + Email for $5/month is a bargain.

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

My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#78

Post by slow_donkey »

systemvoltage wrote: post #49

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…

I'm sure our marketing team will love resolving git conflicts to draft their email copy.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#79

Post by codetheweb »

leetrout wrote: post #5

Linear looks fascinating. We’re using Zenhub now and it’s slow and misused in our org (one giant project board instead of separate boards per repo / project). Curious if anyone here is / has used linear and could compare their experience with it to Monday, Asana or Zenhub?

I’ve used Asana in the past. Compared to Linear, it’s absolutely terrible. It’s super slow, has inconsistent UX, and barely supports keyboard shortcuts. Linear supports keyboard shortcuts for literally everything, is blazing fast, and looks nice. It’s one of the few web apps that I actually enjoying using.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#80

Post by slow_donkey »

systemvoltage wrote: post #77
qeternity wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that I think of it and other comment said - yea, GSuite + Email for $5/month is a bargain. > Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".

Yeah g-suite is a dam bargain especially since it also gets you conferencing, SSO and is one of the few SaaS you'd truly want to buy and retain.
Post reply on HN