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Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

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Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com ). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against…

Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the critical part of your business.

lol

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Amplitude compare vs MixPanel?

1. Mixpanel is super expensive. 2. Mixpanel is slow as a hell in a real world apps. I'm not joking. You can wait by 15 seconds to load one page. 3. Amplitude is 10 times more flexible and intuitive. 4. Amplitude is free completely. 100 000 000 events included. Mixpanel gives about 5000, maybe a bit more, just for testing purposes.

That's outrageously wrong.

Free Plans Monthly: Amplitude: 10 million events Mixpanel: 100k tracked users with 1000 events each. aka 100 million tracked events.

https://amplitude.com/pricing https://mixpanel.com/pricing/

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#84
For our bootstrapped AI startup:

* Slack for communication (we do very little email, except externally with customers; even then, we often set up shared Slack channels) * Justworks.com for payroll and insurance (tried Gusto and Rippling, and had horrible issues) * Google Docs and Notion for docs (our team is split 50/50) * SurgeHQ.ai for data labeling / creating ML training datasets * Github as both a code repository and project management tool (tried Asana and Trello, but it was always easier to stick to Github) * Heroku for hosting * Cleanshot.com for creating screenshots (I take a lot of screenshots, so it's crazy how much time this has saved me, compared to the default Mac screenshotter) * Google Analytics (but I hate it, so looking for a recommendation) * Pitch.com for creating slide decks

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53? Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings. Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?

1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more. 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another…

Probably not a good enough benefit in the age of letsencrypt but you do get free certs if you're with R53.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com ). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against…

Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the critical part of your business.

Yup we now have two-of-everything :P

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#87
post #84

For our bootstrapped AI startup: * Slack for communication (we do very little email, except externally with customers; even then, we often set up shared Slack channels) * Justworks.com for payroll and insurance (tried Gusto and Rippling, and had horrible issues) * Google Docs and Notion for docs (our team is split 50/50) * SurgeHQ.ai for data labeling / creating ML training datasets * Github as both a code repository…

Why do you hate Google Analytics? Too slow/complicated?

Depends on what you need (basic stats vs detailed user statistics and events) and how you want to do it (free service, paid service, self-hosted platform).

If you need something that provides a bit of everything and is self-hosted you can check out the platform I'm building: https://uxwizz.com/

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#88

For PlotAPI ( https://plotapi.com ) I’m using: - FastAPI for the SaaS itself - WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions - Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations - FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK) I’ve been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It’s looking great so far for content and subscription management.

Hi thanks for sharing.

Can you please explain what Nikola is? I tried searching for it, but it's a common name.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#89
I found https://hanami.run (soon to be mailwip.com due to name conflict with hanamirb.org) to setup email forwarding and a simple blog platform by "email to post" and webhook.

Use it you can consolidate emails from multiple domains to forward to the same inbox. And you can add webhook/slack notification too.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#90
post #9

— Netlify + GCP for hosting — Twilio for anything Messaging — Stripe + Paypal for payments — Biztoc.com for finding content to post — Plausible.io for analytics — Paperform for forms — Bear.app for documentation

I'd caution you away from Paypal — they're going through tons of API changes right now and their API broke down the week before our conference, and I had to swap it out for Stripe's API at the last minute.
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