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Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
- 1stcity3rdcoast 7y agoThis is a good summary of The monthly investment for even a one-person side project. Do you also use an accounting tool like QuickBooks or Xero?
- patwalls 7y agoNo, just spreadsheets for now, but I do pay for a tax accountant. I will add that right now.
- disiplus 7y agowhat is wip.chat, the homepage is useless.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fishsander 7y agohttps://wip.chat/about https://wip.chat/about
- endorphone 7y agoA producthunt simile it seems.
- Pete-Codes 7y agoWIP came out long before Product Hunt started doing something similar.
- endorphone 7y agoOkay. I meant no judgement on lineage or merit, but producthunt is the relative frame of reference that I think most people on HN would understand. Can you clarify on your point, though? PH has been around since at least 2013. The .chat TLD didn't go live until 2015, and that specific domain was registered is late 2017. Do you mean a specific features like todo or something? Both sites are ostensibly primarily motivated by self-promotion, usually under the guise of some sort of public productivity tools.
- keesj 7y agoHi there. Maker of BetaList and WIP here. I think there are two things being conflated. BetaList (startup discovery platform) was created before Product Hunt, and WIP (our community for makers) is an offshoot of that. Product Hunt eventually launched a similar service. FWIW, I have to strongly disagree that WIP is primarily motivated for self-promotion. It's really more like a virtual co-working spaces where we all share what we're working on (hence the name), exchange feedback, keep each other accountable, etc. BetaList and Product Hunt are indeed partly about self-promotion and partly about discovery.
- keesj 7y agoMaker of WIP here. You're right. The homepage doesn't make a lot of sense to new (potential) users. Our focus has been on increasing the product for our existing members, but eventually we'll be improving the homepage/etc for people not yet familiar with the service.
- 3PercentMan 7y agoI think Mailbrew is overrated if you have a good twitter feed.
- patwalls 7y agoWhat I love about Mailbrew is I can specify things like: - send me X top tweets from X user in last month - send me all tweets with the words "XYZ" And for the obvious reasons it keeps me off twitter and less subject to their addictive design/UI.
- klhugo 7y agoThat was a very nice breakdown of costs for a side project. Thanks for sharing this!
- reustle 7y agoHelpful list, and a good reminder for everyone to check their own lists. Would have loved to see a "total" :)
- mdorazio 7y agoGreat list. I'm seeing $1529/month + stripe fees (probably 2.9%). Most of that is Upwork and Heroku.
- river99 7y agoI'd be curious to see what the other side is as well.
- busterarm 7y agoInterestingly you're paying people to do on Upwork about what I priced out for the absolute cheapest ERP/CRM software to run my own business.
- patwalls 7y agoHaha! What ERP are you using, if you don't mind me asking? Also, I wrote a little bit about my approach to freelancers, may give you some more context on that $1k/month: https://www.starterstory.com/hire-freelancers https://www.starterstory.com/hire-freelancers
- inviromentalist 7y agoStarter story spam
- marceldegraaf 7y ago@patwalls a note regarding Sendgrid. As a user of their free tier (for a freelance job) I was recently bitten by a shared IP that was put on a block list, probably due to abuse by another Sendgrid user. Support does not migrate accounts on the shared IP pool to another IP, basically leaving me unable to send email for days. Might be worth upgrading to their Pro plan ($90/mo). This gets you your own dedicated IP so this won't bite you in the future.
- crispyporkbites 7y agoDedicated IPs can be worse for low senders, as there's no other legitimate volume coming through outside of your own, so you need to build and maintain your own reputation entirely. Ideal solution would be a provider that only allows trusted people on shared IPs. Generally a non-free provider will be best for that.
- Cshelton 7y agoThis is why you pay for their services. Companies like SendGrid, MailChimp, AWS, etc, know how to best mitigate this and have relationships a single person can't have. They do a lot on their platforms to prevent abuse.
- em-bee 7y agohow is building and maintaining your own reputation a problem for low volume sender?
- crispyporkbites 7y agoIf you don’t build a reputation your emails won’t get delivered. New IPs have no reputation, so your users will suffer.
- avb 7y agoI’m using Mailgun on the free plan with some small orgs, got bit by the shared ip thing. A quick note to their support and they switched the free plan to a new ip. Zero hassle.
- bilekas 7y agoI like this list as a list of services that I would like to write, maybe improve on and undercut. :)
- jasonhr13 7y agoFind someone with a college email address and sign up for Github Student Developer Pack. SendGrid for free (15k/month sends) as well as 150/year in AWS credit for 4 years if you continue to have access to the student email.
- crispyporkbites 7y agoThat does not seem like good advice for someone running a business.
- rchaud 7y agoand how much would he have to pay to said college student to have access to his email account for 4 years?
- crazygringo 7y agoSide note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?! I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable. This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen. When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong. Is it unreasonable to expect body text on the web to be roughly the same size as the body text used in my computer's menus and dialogs? Obviously those should already be set to the ideal legible size, so what is with these blogs deciding to choose mega-sized letters instead??
- patwalls 7y agoAgreed. I built this Daily Journal app and just been hacking on it for the last couple months. I'll bring the text size down a bit soon.
- patwalls 7y agoMade it smaller. Lmk if that looks better?
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoAgreed. I prefer that default text be left default size. On some device I may set the default size higher for ease of reading (ex hidpi screens), but let me decide that... not the website.
- JosephRedfern 7y agoAgreed.
- jjeaff 7y agoIt actually looks fine on my mobile.
- kotojo 7y agoI personally love this trend. It's one of the first sites I've been on in a while that I didn't have to bump up everything to a readable size.
- reidjs 7y agoIf you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is. https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a-digitalocean-droplet-to-host-server-side-rendered-web-applications-382fdce32ff https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...
- patwalls 7y agoI'd like to switch platforms but I'm SO fast and comfortable with Heroku. Change costs for me might be high. I'd rather spend time on marketing / features that could get me 3 more customers/month to make up for it... I learned Heroku at my coding boot camp and they have made thousands of $$ off of me since...
- jblake 7y agoAgreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business. The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.
- reidjs 7y agoIf you want an in-between I'm a huge fan of DigitalOcean. Fantastic documentation, better support in my experience, all in all more welcoming to the 'middle-guy.' Totally understand that it's probably not a great use of your time to switch over if your margins can afford 800/mo with ease.
- hopia 7y agoDigitalOcean certainly is great, I'm using it too, but it's still far more work running your stuff there vs Heroku.
- inviromentalist 7y agoMy biggest concern is being dependent on these systems, the systems changing, and it breaking the process. I have the mentality of self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable. Most these services have a learning curve anyway. Are the services really worth it?
- balls187 7y ago> Are the services really worth it? Yes. > self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable. What is the cost to get something that has a better uptime than the SLA's of the services you are replacing? Focus on getting to paying customers. After that, you'll see where your time is better off spent. Example: I just signed up for a trial for Stripe Sigma. I was going to build my own basic BI using their API. Instead it costs my business ~$10/mo at our size. Now I can spend what would have been time to build, test, deploy that service, to instead just answer the business questions I had.
- lunchables 7y agoWell, you could also be outsourcing your "build, test, deploy" to someone else and save even more time!
- balls187 7y agoActually, it would take me more time to write the spec, than it would be to just sign up for sigma.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoThe problem is no using a service and having it briefly be unavailable. The problem is that you use a service, get reliant on it, and then they 10x their price, remove key features, and then go out of business.
- stevenwliao 7y agoAt that point, if you then build your own, you're still ahead.
- jdtbuchanan 7y agoI would be interested to hear why you use Sendgrid and Klaviyo? Is that just legacy transaction emails or are there features you can't accomplish with one or the other?
- patwalls 7y agoI use Klaviyo to send a weekly newsletter to my lists, drip sequence after signup, or one-off marketing emails. I use SendGrid for when users sign up, reset password, etc.
- eljimmy 7y agoThis list would be a lot more interesting if he disclosed what his business actually was...
- martinrlzd 7y agoThank you! I feel like building the right thing. :)
- ttoinou 7y agoUpwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers. I especially use Upwork because I don't have to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc. The same for me, and they take a cut both sides (3% or 50 USD / month + 3% fees USD/EUR on my side and 5 to 10% on the freelancer side). I was wondering if there was an alternative to upwork for those who only need it for its automatic billing system + time tracking + weekly summary + screenshots of work (don't need to research for new talents). I guess time tracking tool could enter this market
- patwalls 7y agoI would pay for that if it's cheaper and my freelancers were OK with it. I think another benefit of using Upwork for this is the hours get logged on their Upwork profile which makes them more "active" and preferred in the Upwork algo?
- ttoinou 7y agoYeah right ! That's why I was thinking that freelancers would be OK to stay a few months on upwork (and improve their profile) and if you want to hire them more long term they'll be OK to switch and avoid the high fees
- Normal_gaussian 7y agoupwork has a non-circumvention clause with a minimal $3500 fee to break (it pretty much always scales to be not worth breaking). As to "how will they catch us" it would seem to fairly obvious from the freelancers schedule
- ttoinou 7y agoThey are not necessarily enforceable. It's probably just to scare the freelancers. Once upwork makes contact between freelancer and employers there's nothing they can do to really prevent them from talking between each others and agreeing on working on a new contract. (also I've been told this clause is only for the 2 first years.. ?)
- rolltiide 7y agoHow much they pay for Klayvio? I want to quit Mailchimp
- whitepoplar 7y agoCurious, what don't you like about Mailchimp?
- rolltiide 7y agoThe pricing or the tiered features available. If there is a cheaper one I am curious about it
- zanek 7y agoYou should post these on yourstack.com so it’s easier to aggregate and comment on. The product hunt team just released that. I hadn’t heard of Wip but am keen to see if there is any value in joining it. Thanks
- danieljacksonno 7y agoIn the end I subscribed to so many digital services that I made a tool for collecting email receipts for bookkeeping... If you think it's worth one more subscription to cut down the work bookkeeping for all the other subscriptions, then check out receiptrunner.com
- swalsh 7y agoThere's something to this. I recently changed my credit card number due to some fraud activity. Since the change there has been a number of services I no longer use, but that I had completely forgot about popping up asking me to update my info.
- juped 7y agoIf you use American Express, they actually update things for you, or continue accepting the old number for specific recurring billings where they don't have the system in place to update the number.
- hnrodey 7y agoYou can partially solve this with something like privacy.com. That's what I'm using after cancelling my credit card (lost) and getting a new number.
- robenkleene 7y agomacOS has a cool built-in feature for collecting receipts: Go to "File > Print..." and then in the lower left pulldown that says "PDF", select "Save to Web Receipts", it will save a PDF to a folder called "Web Receipts" in your "Documents" folder. Works for both website receipts and email receipts.
- qubex 7y agoI’m going to be cynical and applaud the author at one of the most effective S.E.O. efforts I have seen lately: including his own app on a list of effective and well-curated apps for startups.
- harrisreynolds 7y agoThis is a great point. A good move by the author. Add some value, but extract some value as well. Here is the process for everyone. Insert your tool in #2 1) Create post about the tools you use 2) Include Webase [1] 3) Watch traffic roll in! :-) [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- riantogo 7y agoThat is brilliant. Here is a list of 10 experts in their field. #5 Self.
- kupopuffs 7y agoDo cynical people applaud? This is more of a woke economist perspective.
- amelius 7y agoIf everybody does this then I guess it's up to Google to compute the consensus among those lists.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- donmcronald 7y agoI think it's unethical. It's very similar to all of the paid content garbage that's saturated Google over the last few years. Is his app really the best option in that product space? I know most people around here will applaud the effort as clever, but I think it's the type of tactic that's ruining the internet. Nothing gets published without some marketing related alterior motive.
- abinaya_rl 7y agoThat was a very nice report about ongoing costs involved in the one-man business
- BlameKaneda 7y agoI tallied up everything and he spends about $18,348/year. Assuming he's making enough of a profit, his expenses seem worth it.
- mxschumacher 7y agoI've read mixed reviews about Upwork (low quality work, people not being paid etc). What are better alternatives to find freelancers?
- ttoinou 7y agoIn which situations would freelancers not be paid ? I feel like once the employer accepts the contract it his responsibility to stop it if the work is not done (so the employer will always be paid for the hours he submitted)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- travellingprog 7y agoI've been a freelance full-stack developer for the past 1.5 years. I never bothered trying out Upwork, because I had the impression the price competition there was insane, so I can't comment on the experience there. But I've been on Toptal for the past year and it's been an overall great experience. Not only have I not had an issue being paid, but Toptal actually guarantees my invoice payments: basically there's a clause that states that I can expect a payment from Toptal within a few days after the invoice due date, regardless of whether or not the client actually paid the invoice.
- ttoinou 7y agoSince you use Stripe you receive directly money from customers (100K USD annually according to https://patwalls.co/2019-going-full-time-as-a-founder https://patwalls.co/2019-going-full-time-as-a-founder ) without an intermediary to handle VAT / GST how do you handle VAT / GST globally ? Are your customers restricted to some locations ? Do you file VAT / GST return only for a few states ?
- strogonoff 7y agoI'm curious whether Upwork actually makes $1000 per month in fees from author's business. That'd be quite impressive, meaning upwards from $10k per month on contractor-related expenses (assuming Upwork takes at least 10%). Alternatively, this could mean that actual contractor bills add up to about $1000 per month total, including Upwork fees.
- 0xTJ 7y agoJust a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60% to make reading comfortable on a laptop.
- echelon 7y agoI can second that. It looks fine on mobile, but awful on my work Macbook. Head's up to the author, you might want to check your CSS.
- PakG1 7y agoThat's weird, I've never ever heard someone complain that a font was too big to be comfortable to read before. Do you have any sense what about it makes it more uncomfortable for you? Small fonts are easy to explain.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- teach 7y agoI've reached an age where I have trouble reading small fonts, and often zoom the web page to be readable. In fact, I have HN permanently set to 125%. Yet even I thought the font was too big in this one. I _didn't_ have to shrink the text to be more readable but I had to scroll more than usual.
- john-tells-all 7y agohi Pat! I'd love to subscribe to your blog, but couldn't find an RSS feed. Could you add one? Thanks! My wife has a consulting business, so forwarded your practical list of service to her.
- riffic 7y agoLooks like the site is built from a somewhat hobbyist-class (although quite impressive and open source) CMS: https://github.com/gkiely/ydnw https://github.com/gkiely/ydnw https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-don-t-need-wordpress https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-don-t-need-wordpress I would as well echo support for adding RSS capabilities here.
- patwalls 7y agoI built this daily journal thing a few months ago, just been hacking on it. Not too much of a blog but just to keep myself writing every day and putting my ideas down. Thinking about ways to keep people updated, but I want to keep it minimal with no CTAs or email list. RSS is easy to add. Open to suggestions.
- ineedasername 7y agoAs Upwork is both the single largest spend and actually larger than all the others combined, I'd be curious about an additional breakdown of costs for what types of services are being purchased through the platform.
- isthis129283 7y ago$1529...you're welcome.
- pottertheotter 7y agoAnyone used Streak and Pigeon? Curious to hear thoughts?