If you go to that Linear one’s site on an iPhone and zoom in really fast on their image of the todo list client, it immediately restarts your phone.
It does actually, that’s crazy - if anyone is curious enough to check it out would love to hear why
SaaS We Happily Pay For
81–90 of 229 posts
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#82While 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.
I know your point of view is the accepted mainstream view, but I disagree and I never did it in 15 years.
Maintaining a gitlab instance, a mattermost instance, a kubernetes instance, an elk instance on a cheap VPS provider gets you in a pretty good place for very little money. Your internal tools won't need much attention until you hit a higher number of employees.
Also with three employees you can still get away with a lot of free stuff (eg. a discord or matrix server for chatting, private GitHub repos)
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#83While 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…
Considering that the effective salary of 1 person/mo would be around ~15k, I think spending $200 to make people more efficient is absolutely worth it
The person at ~15k/month (which is a really good salary) wouldn't only be doing that. I maintain a lot of tools that would cost 1000x if we paid subscriptions per user @ SaaS and it probably takes me 1-2 days per month. We're at ~150 devs.
I do a lot of other work in the other days of the month including coding, automation, leading, etc. etc.
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most importantly it gets you SSO on basic plans for any SaaS. Big companies using Okta or something have to pay for all those Enterprise plans just for that.
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#85Linear 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 use Linear and have previously used Asana and Jira. Linear is much, much better. It's much faster, the design is better (easier to understand what i'm looking at, switch between board and list views), and doesn't have infinite complexity. You can create tasks, and subtasks, and projects, and that's it. There are Cycles (sprints) with some neat scheduling tools for it, that may not be useful for you if you don't work that way -- our team does so it's very nice. I'd recommend giving it a shot, I think once you actually use the application for about 5 minutes you'll understand if it's worth it or not.
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering that the effective salary of 1 person/mo would be around ~15k, I think spending $200 to make people more efficient is absolutely worth it
Sir, where do you pay $15k for a startup developer salary?!
Actually there is a more important comparison than salary: what benefit accrues to the company for 1 employee month.
When a company is undergoing fast growth, the return from one month of work can be startlingly huge. Every tool that enables better use of time is a multiplier on the income generated by that employee.
Also note, “sir” seems snarky to me at best and insulting at worst. Are you even answering a guy?
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#87While 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…
Your summary is totally right. But first part of the comment feels too one-sided (pro-saas). So couple of balancing thoughts for each point.
(1). Tractor analogy seems too extreme - it's about skiping automation in farming. But if one skips saas, one still automates in house (the amplifier is the automation). Also, frequently "saas" feels less like "tech" and more like "outsourcing".
(2) Total cost of ownership applies to saas as well. Lawyer's time for contract. Developer\architect time to figure out documentation, so company would know what configuration to ask for. Communication being external also costs time.
(3) Solutions for data ownership exist, but it's one additional thing to worry about.
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#88Shhh... 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…
> and so much more with Github API/webhooks
> shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.
So instead you should spend valuable engineering time designing, building, and maintaining your own collaboration tools?
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If that's internal meetings, absolutely, that's an issue. But I think a company that size that's trying to iterate on their offering should be booking a lot of meetings to talk with customers and potential customers, and that could easily take 15 mins a day in my experience.
Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For
#90While 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.
Exactly, eventually some of the Saas's will disappear.