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A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
- wenbin 7y agoA one-person startup uses not less than yours :) https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin... It's a good thing that we can outsource tasks to 3rd party SaaS for a small fee, rather than hiring full-time employees
- wolco 7y agoThanks for providing that link. It's not very often I would come back to a thread just to comment on a website. The vast amount of content available quickly is impressive. The tagline is podcast searching like google. How do you keep discovering new content like google, are you running your own crawler?
- punnerud 7y agoI love this post. Have you upgraded PyCharm to make use of the Django support in your IDE?
- ericlewis 7y agoI may be lazy but I had to do math to figure out what you spend. Maybe total it? Just as a litmus test.
- bcrosby95 7y ago> we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month
- docdeek 7y agoAirtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?
- Cau5tik 7y agoSublime Text isn't free. https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
- diggan 7y agoWell, kind of (at least last time I used it, which was Sublime Text 2). They say it's an evaluation but there is no time-limit, just an annoying popup every now and then (or on start? Can't remember) but it's effectively free if you're OK with that.
- hackmiester 7y agoI mean, basically all desktop software is free if you’re okay with violating the license. Not something I’d advise if you’re trying to run a business.
- wolco 7y agoParent is correct. But business would want to buy a licease for support more than fear of legal threat or Oracle shakedown. https://www.sublimetext.com/2 https://www.sublimetext.com/2
- lonelappde 7y agoSupport for a text editor?
- diggan 7y agoNot at all because usually you have to circumvent some protection they have, and in that case the intent is to continue using the software in a way they didn't intend and probably breaking some agreement you made when installing/downloading. In the Sublime Text case, they explicitly give you unlimited time to trial the software and buy it if you get value from it (which, if you do, please buy it [and same with other software] so we can make the world go around). Their license seems to explicitly say that you can evaluate it until you either stop using it or buy it, without breaking any agreement. Edit: I should clarify more about my own position about it before it gets taken with the wrong idea in mind. I do agree that if you do continuously use Sublime Text (or other software with similar license/trials) and get value from it, you should absolutely buy it to support the developers. Continuing to use beyond that would not be the ethical thing to do. But it does seem like the developers of Sublime Text are confident enough that people who can afford it and gets value from it, will eventually purchase a license. Which, since the company still exists, seems to work out, and that's great to see.
- lhr0909 7y agoI feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably condense them into a centralized spot.
- noahtallen 7y agoAdditionally, one could sacrifice on features and use GitHub projects instead of Trello. That’s what we do at work. Not great, but pretty painless for tracking dev work
- falcor84 7y agoSure, but in this particular example, they're on the free Trello tier, and I'd say it's already more full-featured than GitHub projects. Btw, another cool alternative that I've been playing with lately is ClickUp, which also has a generous free tier. And on a general note, given that these days all of these systems have good APIs and export capabilities, I'd say there isn't that much business case to consolidate to fewer systems.
- scarejunba 7y agoThey only spend $227/month in total. Why even bother centralizing? That's peanuts. I spend more than that on my personal AWS bill.
- sidcool 7y agoWhy is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It's decent for chat in a small Startup. Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an overkill.
- ftreml 7y agogsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code, slack, discord partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and bitbucket.
- Proziam 7y agoI feel this on a near-spiritual level. Once you factor in communication tools (including but not limited to...project management, email, calendar, chat, VOIP, and CRM) alongside your "real" technical stuff that actually powers your services or products, you invariably end up with a ton of different tools because nobody has the time to even try to build all those different core components. There's a ton of friction to doing anything differently. For example, I'm fairly anti-google. Therefore, I host my own email. Doing that, even in the most simplistic way possible, means utilizing several tools or technologies (mailinabox + a deliverability service being the most simplistic I can imagine). A larger operation would certainly have more specific needs that would require another approach - and the human effort of implementation and maintenance that goes with it. We have a handful of people, in 3 different countries, each requiring differing currencies (USD, GBP, EURO). Our client base is global. Combine the operational complexity with everything else and even a small operation can start to feel like a fortune 500 company.
- city41 7y agoWhat is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team? Also Github? You can now have private repos with up to three collaborators for free.
- Axsuul 7y agoThey are free for personal private repos. Team private repos aren't!
- vidyesh 7y agoI think OP is trying to say they don't need to pay for the Pro or for the Team as there are just two collaborators, the free version includes 3 collaborators on private repos. https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
- city41 7y agoYeah, that's what I was getting at. I suppose having the code in a personal repo gives the repo owner more power? I've never founded a startup, so not sure how typical cofounder trust dynamics are.
- Stratoscope 7y ago> What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team? You get Gmail and the other services on your own domain instead of a gmail.com address. I'm an even smaller team (me, myself, and I) and I pay for G Suite for that reason.
- thatsnice 7y agoI pay for G Suite as a freelancer. It lets me use my own domain for email and meeting requests instead of an @gmail account.
- nottorp 7y agoThe $7/month option is flexible enough for a small company and is not per user, thus negligible. The per user options start to add up...
- taylorwc 7y agoIt's fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github. When I add a few staff members, I'll happily pay for Slack and Notion. Yes, it's a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it's worth it. If I close one deal, it's worth it. But really I love that I can set up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend my time thinking about higher-value things. I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really expensive as you scale, but I'm pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly cost.
- DocG 7y agoCompany I work for has grown to 10 people and the pricing per member things are getting out of hand. We had to drop some services, bc if there is a service that costs 10 per user for just one feature, it's they add up real quick (looking at you slack for example). Some services have free tier or special pricing if it's only couple of members, but once you exhaust that, you are dropped to full pricing. I think there is a opportunity for different pricing for growing companies between 5-25 people. It seems that this pay per member works for small companies, couple of people or huge ones. But if you are growing with limited revenue the costs are way too high while you are still also finding your market.
- watt 7y agoNo reason to look at Slack like that. It may be well worth the price. When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email. It's pretty big deal. And that's why they can charge that level of subscription.
- gibolt 7y agoCompared to a salary, it is nothing. If your company functions and people are more productive because of it, ~$80 a year is nothing.
- hedora 7y agoI’d be more productive without slack. It’s useful for distributed teams, and for incident response, but basic messaging + jira/github + zoom cover those use cases better. Slack was OK before the bot stuff and integration with ldap/email groups landed. Now, it’s at least as spammy as email, except not searchable, the (non customizable) UI is worse, and the social norm is that you spend 100% of the day checking a firehose of broadcast messages and machine generated spam (in some teams, even after working hours).
- csomar 7y ago> When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email. That's exactly why I dislike Slack. You lose the whole history of your communication because Slack history is not very navigable.
- ornornor 7y ago“28 other tools” on top of the two already working there? Sorry, couldn’t resist.
- chrisseaton 7y agoWhy this personal abuse?
- noncoml 7y agoPlease consider paying/donating for smaller “free” tools like sublime etc.
- matsemann 7y agoNot exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used by other small startups.
- fyfy18 7y agoI don't think it adds up to that much, compared to the cost of developers. Where I live in Eastern Europe, a single mid-level developer would cost at least $5k/mo once you take into account taxes, office space and benefits. In SV I guess you are talking well over $20k/mo. $20k/mo is a lot of software.
- mxschumacher 7y agonon-technical staff need access to tools like Notion, Slack and Hubspot, the bills add up quickly
- luckylion 7y agoThey do, but it only matters if you're working in a region with very low wages or you have a lot of people that only work for a few hours. I see those tools mostly like a fast computer, good internet, drinks and snacks etc. They really aren't that expensive compared to the employee but they will help the employee be much more effective.
- PeterStuer 7y agoI see this argument get trotted out a lot. Compared to <dev salary cost>, adding service x,y and z percentage wise is just a small increment. The problem that gets easily overlooked is that compared to the costs being made, the profit in many cases is also just a small percentage of the revenue, and the small % increment in costs can mean a large % decrement of profits. You should always compare incremental cost of revenue to the margin, not to the base cost. Now if you are running a profitable SaaS business with 80% margins, a 4% increase in spend might not mean the end of the world even if it was wasted on spurious licenses or other frills, but if you are a healthy service business operating on 12% margins then that 4% increase will reduce your profits by a massive 33%. This doesn't mean that you have to make do with the bare minimum and skimp on decent hardware or development environments, but it also means the marginal productivity/retention/quality increases must in the end be worth it in terms of increased aggregate profits, and not be justified as 'you already pay me 5K a month, so whats another 250 for ...
- tamalsaha001 7y agoThanks for the list. Curious how does Mixplanel compare to Google Analytics? Is it for similar use-case or different?
- edanm 7y agoYou also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating. This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.
- crubier 7y agoTrue but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs. You do pay rent, but in many case the sum of SaaS subscription is in the same order of magnitude as the rent.
- apk-d 7y agoIs this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same number, but in a different currency, which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab for source control, vscode for writing code, and... honestly, what else do you even need to run a software company anyway? At my last startup, the total monthly subscription cost was the $1 Bitwarden tier (granted, we were tiny). And yes, a Ryzen system bolted to a $10 lackrack was entirely sufficient for our hosting needs.
- omnimus 7y agoLackrack is magnificent. First time i am seeing this.
- oarsinsync 7y agoLackracks have been around since the early 2000s at least, probably earlier than that, even. There's a whole range of Ikea hacks that exist (and dedicated websites for them). Highly recommend perusing the wide range of options if you like the Lackrack!
- Hnrobert42 7y agoI am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad. rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO’s insistence that we switch to a different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution. Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won’t give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other’s salaries. We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday, salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going forward with the departed colleague’s plan to move all our infrastructure to DO. So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT department is so behind the times and won’t let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick. (All that said, my job isn’t bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my job is to wrangle it.)
- gibolt 7y agoSeems like there should be some basic review processes in place. Any external dependency/purchase should require sign-off of at least one of only a few decision makers. This should be very similar to a code review, but seen by CTO, CIO, and CEO (whichever combination is most relevant) so that big unexpected, costly structural changes don't cost long term disfunction and pain.
- z3t4 7y agoOne thing i've noticed about markets is that when there a little to choose from you buy few tools, but expect them to do more, and you are prepared to invest time into learning them. However if there are a lot to choose from, you want more simple tools, dont want to invest time, and prefer the tools you already know.
- moksly 7y agoI’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also cheaper. I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it. I think if you got the full teams/one-note experience on the essential plan that it might be better, but you don’t get the full experience in the browser. One example is that you can use Excel inside Onenote in the browser. But since I don’t really like slack or the g-suite stuff either, it’s basically the same with less hassle.
- pravj 7y agoI find this interesting, It shouldn't take much time before we have a new category of startups: - that lets you (as a startup) optimize spending on day-to-day tools (similar to optimizing your cloud spendings)
- Roritharr 7y agoI'm currently looking into digital whiteboarding solutions, Miro & Mural seem to be the tools of choice, but both are so expensive that I'd rather hold my nose and wait for Microsoft to invest in the Web Version of Whiteboard instead of spending another 4000$/yr on a SaaS App that gets used by 5 people 2 times a weeks and 30 people once every quarter...
- girishso 7y agoMS Teams is very buggy/has less features, we're researching other tools atm.
- dependsontheq 7y agoYes we tried to switch to Teams from Slack ... but everyone hated it with passion. Hate is not good for productivity...
- girishso 7y ago
- davidjgraph 7y agoFrom the other side (vendor perspective) we see this SaaS fatigue a lot. We have a free, open source, unlimited use product that has a very good, commercial, alternative. What we hear in calls is that there are just too many SaaS tools in the company and the monthly cost (or security review of all tools) ends up with the management saying "pick your top 5,10,15 most important" and drop the rest. The GSuites, Slacks, AWS, Notions, Zooms, etc (picking from the article list) get in the top priority list and that list is so full the medium priority stuff just gets crossed out and pushed down to budgets lower down. Our category just rarely makes it. A lot of the time we win out just because the company wants to avoid the admin of the paid solution, the tool just isn't _that_ important. Being creative in your business model, I think, is the way to go, particularly in terms of freemium offerings. With the number of SaaS apps trying to get your monthly cost, being outside the core list is getting harder and harder and you need to define those niches and totally own them. Forget starting at the company level, start with 1-5 people groups for a _long_ time.
- enumjorge 7y agoI’m assuming you’re talking about draw.io. What’s your business model?
- davidjgraph 7y agoCharging only for Atlassian integrations, that’s where the revenue/effort ratio is best.
- ska 7y agoAs an aside, draw.io (now diagrams.net I see, why the change?) is a nice tight project. I was an early adopter (i.e. from beta releases) of lucidchart and really liked their first few years; convinced two companies to get a bunch of licenses. Over time they've become a hot mess of bad patterns in SAAS and I won't touch them for a few years now (and let a license for ~100 people expire). Congrats on keeping things simple and not making it harder to use over time.
- 7y ago
- aequitas 7y agoSome open source companies offer free use of their product if your product or organisation is open source as well. For our tool[0] we got offered free use of Gitlab Gold and a Sentry account for error tracking. [0] https://websecuritymap.org/ https://websecuritymap.org/
- filipsch 7y agoIf you’re using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a pretty bad experience. I’d spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your dyno is always up.
- vidyesh 7y agohttps://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/ https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/
- gbourne 7y agoHeroku limits the number of hours you can have up - 550 a month ( https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours ). So if you have a system with real users, you really should just pay the $7 a month.
- MapleWalnut 7y agoAdditionally any deploy will give users a moment of downtime because Heroku only supports rolling deploys on paid dynos.
- Jare 7y agoI believe the attention cost of using and keeping up with so many great tools is underappreciated. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather use Github Projects than Trello not because GHP is better (it is not) but because I'm already using Github, and the mental and workflow cost of adding Trello to the mix is (I feel) higher than its additional value. Notion in particular drives me nuts. I mean it's very very well done, but you use it to create a hierarchy of collaborative documents... because apparently GSuite docs are not good enough? Notion I think is a case of local maxima, because Gdocs/Office365 offer so many more ways to keep documentation and data in better formats (doc, sheet, slides...). Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of a thousand good things. :)
- nojvek 7y agoAgreed. Notion feels quite a bit complex. May be I just don’t understand it yet. I understand AirTable’s value prop. It’s pretty straightforward.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- insulanian 7y agoIt would be interesting to see this kind of list for the "start-ups" in '90s. I guess Windows and MS Office licenses would be unavoidable items on the list.
- pjc50 7y agoSoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it. Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.
- Shacklz 7y ago> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes. That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.
- heartbeats 7y agoAnything is better than nothing, isn't it? Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.
- chishaku 7y agotrickle down is definitely the solution /s
- aguyfromnb 7y ago>This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market. Arguably is the right word. The global economy is a closed system, so money put anywhere makes its way elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but not necessarily any better than other investment. Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides capital for companies as well as income for banks and brokers and finance folk of all sorts (which can then be spent in restaurants and shops). Sure, lower income people have a higher propensity to spend a marginal dollar (because they have to), but that isn't necessarily "better".
- jmtucu 7y agoNo VS Code? Really?
- arminiusreturns 7y agoI have concluded that existing businesses and other certain factors limit the application of what I am about to say to a subset, but there is great room for a holistic "here is your IT stack" company that focuses on open source tooling, reduction of stack complexity, and working out many of the oft-repeated learning curves. It's a huge market opportunity waiting to happen, because death or at least injury by a thousand licensing fee cuts is real. Small startups, small businesses looking to modernize, non-profits, etc would all be potential customers, and unlike the coast-centric viewpoint of HN, those tend to actually be the vast majority of companies in middle America. Many MSP's and various resellers and salesmen make a living off trapping these in lock-in also. I have seen all of this over many years first hand. There is a reason Spiceworks took off so fast. There is also a reason they are hemorrhaging customers... because Spiceworks entire model was built around advertising lock-in type products to customers. (also their tooling sorta sucks, despite being easy and having a decent web front-end)
- lonelappde 7y agoIsn't that what MS, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Amazon, and Google do?
- arminiusreturns 7y agoNot at all. They provide little pieces. Businesses still have to cobble them together. Which is my whole point.
- mleonhard 7y agoYes. I want to pay $500/user-month and get all the internal services and support of a big company, but for my small company. I want all the dev and ops tools to be chosen and integrated already, with maintained tutorials. This product can accelerate innovation.
- oarsinsync 7y ago> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :) If the service you're providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You don't need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the books. It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you're not willing to pay $x/month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to change to make it worth $x/month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y (or $x+y? Are you under charging?) Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your product!
- SergeAx 7y agoI wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?
- thatsnice 7y agoI think it’s because there are 2 of them, each on the $6 plan. G Suite charges per person.
- ThePhysicist 7y agoThat's a bit scary on one hand, it's pretty amazing though how much free value you can get from OS or Freemium tools. We use e.g. the free versions of RocketChat and Gitlab, they work great and we didn't have many problems administrating them (once a short outage due to a full disk, but gitlab.com had multiple outages in the same time frame). So I think if you are willing to put a little effort into self hosting you have a lot of choices available. Deployment and maintenance has become easier as well with tools like Ansible and Docker.
- aabbcc1241 7y agoSome of the listed paid services either has free alternatives or can be easily DIY or self hosted on light vm or raspberry PI with fair enough functionality if you do not want to pay for them. Including error monitoring, topic/channel chatroom, git server.
- narenkeshav 7y agoThere are certain dev tools like Gitlab/Github or AWS/GCP for your product. Besides can't things be simplified to just a couple of tools Like just 1. Gsuite/Office 365 2. Asana/Notion I am building a startup (Early stages) & think about this. I want to create one or two tools & use it. Why need airtable, notion & trello at the same time?
- paulddraper 7y agoWhy use both Notion and Trello for product/feature planning?
- bernardlunn 7y agoI am running a small bootstrapped venture and use a lot of very low cost apps. It works well, particularly as integration tools become much more sophisticated. Loosely coupled looks messy but wins over tightly coupled big enterprise systems
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoAnd your hardware took 100's of tools to make. So what?
- kludgekraft 7y agoAs a B2B startup building an enterprise product, we've had to be wary of using external services as a part of our offering. Our customers prefer predictable/fixed-annual pricing and do not sign up for saas pricing models, especially the ones that cost a lot at scale. Also, this eats into our margins as the external service has no obligation/contract to reduce prices.
- TsomArp 7y agoI really don't get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some features, but for the most part it works.
- buboard 7y agoi wonder if that leaves them any time to work on their own product
- golergka 7y agoI'm rewatching Mad Men now, and I'm amazed how many people in that era were busy on administrative tasks that are completely automated now – set on 2010s, this series would be about a boutique digital agency that would employ under 10 people, total. This list of software may be long, but without it, it wouldn't be possible to do this with just a 2-person team.
- mannykannot 7y agoThis is brought home to me whenever I take the time to document a process.
- barnyfried 7y agoIts an important statement you make. Kind of. And for startups really pivotal to getting off the ground. But as anyone can experience building on anothers platform if you do that 28x times, eventually they will either raise prices or block you for nepharious reasons or simply go out of business. Business requirements when thought of on a horizontal plane are highly fungible. Once you go vertical your toast. The picture you paint is one of ideation, first level thinking. Once you get to the next (or any level) these assets will turn into instant liabilities. See --> amazon web services. But thats ok its not a horrible thing as long as you can actually build your business on top of moving sand. Its been done but its not fun.
- gjayakrishnan 7y agoSubscribe to Zoho One. 40+ integrated apps at $30 /user /month with an annual subscription (All Employee Pricing). https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/ https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/ https://www.zoho.com/one/ https://www.zoho.com/one/
- judge2020 7y agoJust curious, do you work for Zoho?
- gjayakrishnan 7y agoYes
- bad_user 7y agoIMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup: 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype 2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder 3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment 4. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough 5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription 6. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it
- lowercased 7y agosentry does have a free level which works out decently for small/medium volumes, but yeah, self-hosting might be cheaper.
- iKlsR 7y ago7. Github ($7 / month) — has unlimited private repos for a while now up to 3 collaborators.
- Hendrikto 7y ago> 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype Also, Email is federated, and your communications are not under the control of a single company. Email is easier to archive as well.
- nerdywordy 7y agoLooks like their product is built specifically for Slack.
- joemaller1 7y agoRemember when web pages linked to other web pages?
- tinza123 7y agoIMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.
- Ayesh 7y agoAuthor says it's a 2 person startup. We use communication and collaboration tools such as Skype, Google docs, Dropbox, WhatsApp, etc for personal communication which costs €0. Some of the expenses mentioned in the article can be easily taken off with those free tools which are just as good, if not better. If you develop an in-house tool for comms and collaboration, it will be an overkill for even a big startup.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoOn the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table, react-dates, and react-select. If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look. And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function. It would have been way faster to start from scratch, in my opinion. This has all been over 6 months, so it's not like there was some initial payoff period either.
- danielvinson 7y agoAs a frontend dev, this really pains me. I’ve worked at many places with the same problems - first of all, pushing back on the designer is incredibly important if something is hard to develop. Most designers are doing their best to make things easy to code, but aren’t developers, so they just don’t know. It’s the engineers job to tell them no when things are exceptionally difficult. If they understand that the style change they want is a 3 month project, maybe they would be happy to design something different. Secondly, frontend is hard. Having a senior react dev who can accurately weigh the trade offs of using external components like that would have been invaluable here. People underestimate how much different in skill level a junior react/frontend dev is from a senior engineer with experience in multiple frameworks. 6 months is long time in terms of dev hours - writing a table from scratch for your use case that works with design is usually a 1-2 sprint task, and that’s absolutely the hardest one there. But more reasonably, work should have been done to make a reusable style library to make this even easier.
- siftrics 7y agoIt’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use. I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless (https://usegripeless.com https://usegripeless.com). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptical too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration took less than 10 minutes. Turns out it’s more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue to drive much more revenue than it costs. That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on additional tools. I’m not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don’t work.
- arkitaip 7y agoThat's the main issue of purchasing products and services for you business, i.e it's almost impossible to gauge the real value of what you are buying until you try it out and can analyze the figures. This is why it's crazy that so many sass providers still require credit cards upfront or have an arbitrary 14 days trial period instead of having a free plan with unlimited trial period. It removes so many obstacles from the founder's decision-making process without costing the provider much money.
- gumby 7y agoSometimes it’s hard to come up with an adequately differentiated set of features for free vs paid, especially when you’re still in or close to the mvp phase.
- vasco 7y agoHotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoWhat's the advantage of Robo 3T over Mongo compass?
- analog31 7y agoDuring a gold rush, sell shovels During a shovel rush, sell shovel making tools
- ada1981 7y agoPlease link to all the tools!
- ddevault 7y agoMy two-person startup only uses one SaaS - Twilio, to send Prometheus alarms to my phone, which costs just a few cents at this volume. We use Freenode IRC instead of Slack, but that barely counts. For meetings we set up a Mumble instance, which is the most reliable setup I've tried. All of our infrastructure is on owned hardware, colocated. For taking notes I use text files. More to the point of what these folks are using: Mixpanel, Fullstory, Hubspot, SalesQL, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are unethical and you should not use them. It's not "growth hacking", it's spam. You are a spammer. Drift is annoying, no one likes your chat widget. Seems to me like these guys are drinking the kool-aid pretty hard.
- rammy1234 7y agowhy don't you use basecamp ? It does says it replaces quite a number of tools.
- dbg31415 7y ago28 tools, and no password manager? Oof. For "core" accounts, make sure you've got 2FA on. Google for starters. Also anything to do with code, hosting, or finances.
- rossdavidh 7y agoI wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I'm wondering about: - time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever get (some of them it's trivial, others not so much) - time to do security reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it (which is most of them) - the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of valuable history)
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- ntnsndr 7y agoSuddenly my lab's Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity tools with linked accounts.
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- wellthisisgreat 7y agoSlack, Notion, Airtable, Figma, Sentry (maybe), Hubspot seem to be really unnecessary subscriptions since there are actually better free or one-time payment alternatives.
- luord 7y agoI was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the tools are used for development. I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they're at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing. So all in all, it makes sense; they're paying for what they deem required to use. I couldn't justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that stage. [1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply. On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I don't understand why they're paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth paying for, but they don't strictly need to.
- leephillips 7y agoI noticed this: LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) - Finding leads to contact SalesQL ($29 / month) - Finding email addresses for leads I don't know who these people are, but it looks like their business involves spamming people.
- 5kyn3t 7y agoWhat is the value of Figma ($24 / month for Designing product mocks..) Why not just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious, as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is there some USP?
- zuhayeer 7y agoWe at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free versions of most services (helps that we’re only 2 people) and essentially are only paying for AWS. We’ve always found that there are cheap high quality alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 / month.
- jasonshen 7y ago> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :) Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?
- somberi 7y agoFor about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we live in!
- moiz_ahmed 7y agoFind it interesting that they're paying for premium versions of all those tools yet are using free heroku dynos.. Doesn't that result in their app sleeping?
- rs23296008n1 7y agoI'd be interested to see your disaster recovery plans for each choice you've made. When any of those fail what do you do for continuity? How do you back up your data? What's your failover time between the site being down or other issue and being able to switch to different service? Or is there no plan because all websites are assumed always up... ?
- ile 7y agoI have made this tool, which tries to help with this kind of situation: https://aamu.app/ https://aamu.app/ It already has quite a bit of features, but more features come quite regularly.
- giorgioz 7y agoTruth is you don't need most of SaaS when you start. No-one is saying this out-loud because a lot of SaaS users are also SaaS selles. Sentry, use free tier or self host or use Bugsnag free tier Slack, use Skype instead Notion, use Google Docs instead AirTable, use Google Sheets Office/coworking, work from home or cafes! These huge usage of other SaaS is caused by venture backed companies with a lot of cash looking for an IPO. In practice if you are boostraped instead of venture based you don't want to have a lot of SaaS and/or hire a lot of employees. Some things like bragging about how many employees or SaaS you are using only make sense in venture-back land because by spending more you are getting to the IPO/exit faster but you are sacrificing future long term margins (which you don't care about since you will be long gone). I'm a solo bootstrap founder and yes you can clearly see how I'm biased against venture-backed startups! :D
- giorgioz 7y agoI was curious way the author used Slack for 2 people until I saw their SaaS is a plugin for Slack. As I mentioned in my other comments, startups selling a SaaS spend so much time writing copies and doing sales pitch of how their SaaS product is a must-have that they start to believe that also others SaaS are must-have. SaaS selling to SaaS might turn into a Ponzi piramid scheme if left unchecked.