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SaaS We Happily Pay For

francescodilorenzo.com

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Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#91

Post by mchusma »

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…

Actually technically this is prohibited by stripe. They explicitly ban testing your app in production. We have offered suggestions many times to them, but still no feature here.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#92

Post by noAnswer »

paxys wrote: post #56
ryanSrich wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

The tool in question is (mainly) for scheduling meetings with third parties.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#93

Post by mchusma »

peter_l_downs wrote: post #85
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 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 wor…

I was looking at linear. But we do use kanban (no sprints). Do you know if sprints are basically a required part of using Linear?

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#94

Post by Kipters »

haburka wrote: post #15
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…

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 company is Italian, 15k/mo is VEEERY far from the local reality (more likely 40k/year)

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#96

Post by xx789 »

system2 wrote: post #36
haburka wrote: post #15

Earlier 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?!

15k could be cost to the company, which also looks at employment taxes, office space, health insurance, benefits, hr/support overhead, interviewing, training and managing. A new developer earning 8k/mo easily costs the company 15k/mo.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#97

Post by jedberg »

mchusma wrote: post #91
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…

Actually technically this is prohibited by stripe. They explicitly ban testing your app in production. We have offered suggestions many times to them, but still no feature here.

This isn’t really “testing”. It’s just signing up for their own service. They aren’t making stripe transactions and then reversing them.

If stripe bans you from buying your own service, they may want to rethink that policy.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#98

Post by tptacek »

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…

$200/mo across the time is like the cost of one developer laptop accidentally left under the dripping faucet of a hotel sink in Las Vegas. I know this stuff can add up and people should be careful about racking up recurring charges for stuff they're not really using or getting much value out of, but optimizing away $200/mo doesn't seem like a huge ROI.

If you're paying people on your team, the most expensive thing you probably buy is a person/hour of time.

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#99

Post by 101008 »

mchusma wrote: post #91
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…

Actually technically this is prohibited by stripe. They explicitly ban testing your app in production. We have offered suggestions many times to them, but still no feature here.

I can't use Stripe because it is not available on my country, so I feel curious about why. Why do they ban a small charge on production?

Re: SaaS We Happily Pay For

#100

Post by ketzo »

paxys wrote: post #56
ryanSrich wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

Someone said this in a comment above, but in a 3-person SaaS, everyone works sales. It's likely they're scheduling a huge number of meetings with external folks.
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