My CFO didn't care about the line items inside our $20,000/mo Heroku bill. What he did care about its size. When I told him we could save a lot of money by fost

My CFO didn't care about the line items inside our $20,000/mo Heroku bill. What he did care about its size. When I told him we could save a lot of money by fostering a direct relationship with companies like Redis Labs, he was very receptive to making that happen. My engineers could spend money on new pieces of third-party infrastructure pretty easily via Heroku plug-ins. If the spend got big we figured out how to address it. For this dynamic to work for you as SaaS developer, you need enough runway to wait for your users to adopt your tech and have some fraction organically grow big enough to be real money. This rhymes with how Intuit won the accounting market. They initially got destroyed in reviews when compared to their more mature yet complicated competition, but everyone starting a business wanted cheap and simple. You just need to be willing to wait for enough of your early garage-based startup customers to become S&P 500 companies. While you're waiting, you're also evolving your product so that it better meets your growing customers' needs.