18 ms·

SaaS We Happily Pay For

451 points by frankdilo 6y ago

zanellato19 6y ago
Really nice to see Savycal here. I follow the podcast and wish it a great deal of success :)
- frankdilo 6y ago
  Love Art or Product as well. Derrick is doing an amazing job.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
leetrout 6y ago
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?
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  I use linear extensively. It’s the best tool for managing development tasks imo. Takes the best features of JIRA without the horrible UI/UX (linear has workflows, boards, lists, assignments, tags, cycles, projects, etc). It’s also just incredibly simple to start using. They have a free version, so I’d say it’s worth checking out. It has integration with GitHub and Slack, which is about all I need as far as integrating goes. I’ve used both Monday and Asana. I’ve not used Zenhub. Comparing linear to Monday and Asana, I’d say linear is much faster. It’s a native Mac app. It’s also nicer looking than both imo, which is a big deal for me.
- codetheweb 6y ago
  I’ve used Asana in the past. Compared to Linear, it’s absolutely terrible. It’s super slow, has inconsistent UX, and barely supports keyboard shortcuts. Linear supports keyboard shortcuts for literally everything, is blazing fast, and looks nice. It’s one of the few web apps that I actually enjoying using.
- peter_l_downs 6y ago
  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 work that way -- our team does so it's very nice. I'd recommend giving it a shot, I think once you actually use the application for about 5 minutes you'll understand if it's worth it or not.
  - mchusma 6y ago
    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?
    - peter_l_downs 6y ago
      I do know —- they are not!
- jorde 6y ago
  Linear founder here. As you pointed out issue tracking and project management tools can get easily out of control if concepts get overcomplicated etc. I can't really say of the other tools but we tried to build Linear to be simple and really fast, and adopt to your needs as your grow (e.g. enable more advanced features as you need them). Linear is free to use for a modest issue count so it's pretty low key to try it out for a project with your team if you want to compare it. And if you end up switching, we have open source import scripts available: https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import If you end up trying us out and need help organizing your team, feel free to contact me jori@linear.app
- ohadron 6y ago
  Using Linear in a 5-person team since June and we love it. Super fast, flexible and capable. Highly recommended.
- kevsim 6y ago
  Just to toss another hat in the ring - people who are interested in a tool that has a lot of same performance/hotkey characteristics as Linear but takes a different approach to what a product management tool/issue tracker should be should take a look at Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. We've also got great integrations to Github, Slack, Figma, etc. We've got a pretty generous free tier so you can try it out for quite a while with your team before you need to pay. 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
- fadesibert 6y ago
  Using Linear on an 8 person team. Refugees from JIRA in the corporate world. Absolutely love it - keeps us on track across time zones. The one piece that's probably missing is a tie in to broader "roadmapping" software - I know what's coming in the next 3 sprints, but we haven't found a way to intuitively tie this to our 12-month roadmap - well automatically anyway.
  - peter_l_downs 6y ago
    Maybe https://linear.app/method/roadmap https://linear.app/method/roadmap ? You have to enable it in https://linear.app/YOUR_ORG/settings/roadmap
paxys 6y ago
SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.
- mikaelmello 6y ago
  > made by a solo indie developer that we're happy to support. That would be a good reason to pay well for a nice product imo.
- frankdilo 6y ago
  Heard this one before. "Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew (the product we make) for the same price?" Apparently hundreds of people are happy to pay for quality indie software that solves their problems. We are among them.
  - jariel 6y ago
    "Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew" No, that's not the argument being made though. The argument is 'why is a team of 3 paying 3x$10 to 'schedule meetings'. There's only 3 people, i.e. a reasonable questioning of the value being made. Honestly, $10 is not that much, but why on earth would it be needed is a fair question.
    - kyawzazaw 6y ago
      They might be scheduling meeting with clients?
    - zimbatm 6y ago
      That's not really the argument either. If you cost $100/hour, it only takes 6 minutes of saved time per month to pay back for it. Plus lost opportunity if a potential customer doesn't schedule the call with you. Reducing the friction to talk to customers is pretty big in my books. The question is if the value you get out of the service is higher than what you pay for.
bamazizi 6y ago
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, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!
- frankdilo 6y ago
  That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything. We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution. But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage. As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible. [1]: https://mailbrew.com https://mailbrew.com
  - aparsons 6y ago
    You may also need to hire more people as you scale. With API-based billing, this is fine as you can still allocate a certain expected revenue per user as a cost. With head-based billing, what used to be a fixed cost now grows linearly, yearly, with headcount.
  - maccard 6y ago
    Maybe it's worth waiting until you've scaled your revenue before committing to those outgoings? As someone else mentionrd, 10% of that is for scheduling meetings, with a team of 3!
    - zwayhowder 6y ago
schoolornot 6y ago
No Atlassian products!
- lmm 6y ago
  I'd pay for Trello, though I'm sure they'll ruin it soon. I'd take a pay cut to never have to use JIRA again.
  - unixhero 6y ago
    Honestly was it your managers and the development pipeline you hated or was Jira really to blame here? I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead?
    - lmm 6y ago
      > Honestly was it your managers and the development pipeline you hated or was Jira really to blame here? It was Jira specifically. I've worked in very similar environments with and without Jira, and at a place that migrated onto Jira. > I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead? Trello for the "who's working on what right now" part, even if that leads to having to copy tasks over from another system. For the bug-tracking part... honestly I was happiest using Bugzilla, though I don't know if that even still exists. For the roadmap part, just something like a wiki page, though admittedly a lot of that just comes down to not breaking down your tasks in too much detail too early on.
- Irishsteve 6y ago
  It's free for up to 10 accounts.
makach 6y ago
"A program worth using is worth buying" - hacker/cracker culture
osamagirl69 6y ago
I am not a big fan of SaaA products, and $500/mo seems like a lot for the utility you are getting, but I just wanted to say I love your site design. I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place
AlphENsign_Tech 6y ago
SaaS (you will happily pay for)
ryanSrich 6y ago
SaaS I happily pay for: - CloudFlare - Roam - Slack - Linear - Geekbot SaaS I’m okay with paying for: - Figma - Gsuite - Gusto - Stripe - Netlify SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice: - AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits) - Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do) - Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)
- frankdilo 6y ago
  Didn’t know about Geekbot, worth trying?
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    I have a small team (3 people) and we often don’t work the same hours, so it’s nice to hop on Slack and read about what my other colleagues are working on and how I might be able to help. It’s also a great way to eliminate daily standups. I despise pointless meetings, so anything we can do over async text the better.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I'm very curious about why you classified your "okay with" lower than the other ones, especially stripe which literally drives your revenue!
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    > Figma Figma isn’t very good. It’s better than sketch for prototyping, but not as good for vector. It’s also web based, so it’s painfully slow. I also think it’s a bit expensive. > Gsuite Google is an evil company, but it’s a choice between giving an evil company money, or using a terrible product (O365). I have to focus on the business, not wondering why Outlook isn’t filtering Spam. So Gsuite it is. > Gusto Gusto is fine really. I contemplated putting this one in the Happily category, but ultimately decided to move it down given that I do think it’s a bit expensive for what you get. > Stripe Stripe’s core payment processing is obviously the best around. Where I have issue with Stripe is in the fees they charge (pretty high), and their new Customer Billing Portal. It’s a half baked product that doesn’t support even slightly complex billing mechanisms. > Netlify Netfliy is a good product, and I enjoy using it, but their pricing is strange. I can host 10 sites for free but it’s $15 per user for a collaborator? Seems weird. I’d happily pay say $30/m for unlimited users.
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
An alternative to Vercel and more budget friendly is AWS Amplify console. Costs just a few cents per build, connects with GitHub and you have multiple environments. I’ve had a decent experience - though far from perfect, justifies the cost.
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  We used this for the first time recently and it was delightful. Took 2 minutes to go from nothing to deploying our develop and master branches. It was a bit confusing getting all the per branch/commit deployments behind a password so that added another 10 minutes... Very pleased with it.
plehoux 6y ago
"Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy/pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff." Thanks for the mention Francesco. I'm Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don't hesitate if you have any questions. p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves. [1] https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/
- frankdilo 6y ago
  Wow. Didn’t know you were such a small team. Cheers
- seehafer 6y ago
  ETA on further integrations, esp, HubSpot? Sick of paying Front an extra $20/user/mo just for that.
  - plehoux 6y ago
    Short term roadmap includes calendar integration with Google/Office 365 (early January) + auto contact syncing with Google/Office 365 (end of January). After, the roadmap is open, but we will probably start working on analytics before new integrations.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  Just wanted to note a typo ('ither questions') by Rafael in the landing page demo screenshot. Not that it matters much but I'd suggest changing. Cool functionality, which my enterprise company would use it.
- skaber 6y ago
  Good job @plehoux and team! I'm really please to see your Québec city based SaaS on this list.
- winrid 6y ago
  Who designed your logo? I like it.
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
After reading the comments, whether SaaS is worth it seems to depend on a company's circumstances. A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that's self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.
systemvoltage 6y ago
Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building. You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.
- the-dude 6y ago
  You do realize this reads very much like the infamous Dropbox comment?
- qeternity 6y ago
  Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. For Gmail, docs and drive, G Suite is an absolute bargain. The user experience you describe above (committing Libre office files to git? have you used Libre office) makes me shudder.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Now that I think of it and other comment said - yea, GSuite + Email for $5/month is a bargain. > Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".
    - slow_donkey 6y ago
      Yeah g-suite is a dam bargain especially since it also gets you conferencing, SSO and is one of the few SaaS you'd truly want to buy and retain.
armatav 6y ago
If you go to that Linear one’s site on an iPhone and zoom in really fast on their image of the todo list client, it immediately restarts your phone.
- Sebastian_09 6y ago
  It does actually, that’s crazy - if anyone is curious enough to check it out would love to hear why
- symlinkk 6y ago
  Holy shit, seems like an iOS bug.
- pjfin123 6y ago
  Is this real? I'm on Android and can't try
  - armatav 6y ago
    iOS (current) / Safari
- jorde 6y ago
  We have quite a bit of SVG animations behind that image so might throw a curveball on Safari
  - armatav 6y ago
    Was on current iOS as of writing / on Safari, so makes sense.
- etxm 6y ago
  Wow, that’s consistent! iOS 14.2
  - maltalex 6y ago
    Same on 14.3
jedberg 6y ago
> 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 company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    I would imagine most Netflix employees were already going to get a Netflix subscription. Setting that up so the company gets some extra QA out of that hardly sounds like a bad idea.
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    Automated tests rule, but nothing beats end to end tests, not to even mention that they are also eating their own dogfood. Awesome solution, gp, thanks for sharing!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    I know of no payment service provider that offers support for testing that is good for fairly normal 2020 software development processes. The standard seems to be offering one separate sandbox environment along with your production one, which you can use to experiment without literally making charges/refunds/etc, and possibly a set of specific credentials you can use to simulate various outcomes such as a declined card or insufficient funds. I know of none that offers enough for stronger safeguards such as automated integration testing as part of a CI system, nor additional sandbox environments so you can for example test a new integration independently without disrupting your main test/staging system that is integrated with the sandbox you get automatically. Just to extend the OP's anecdote, we also have someone signed up for real with every payment method we offer, though more recently we've been looking at moving away from these kinds of payment service entirely for this among other reasons.
bawolff 6y ago
Missive - a comment box on an email to discuss emails. I cant help but wonder why not just send an email.
- tehlike 6y ago
  The overhead of adding/removing new people and risking potential internal chatter on an external thread.
keithnz 6y ago
really interesting reading the comments where people are trying to cost optimize, and then others justifying the costs by time saved. Seems to me both ways of thinking about this is the wrong mindset. The more important thing is the operational "flow", how your toolsets come together to allow you to operate your business. Trying to micro optimize costs is not terribly useful, one sass offering on it's own may not terribly justify itself, but because they way it connects with other pieces of your operation, the overall flow is better, and therefore justified. It's the difference between an "accountants" way of seeing a business vs systematic thinking. Much important to think about how the "whole" than the parts.
unixhero 6y ago
I pay for a container selfhosting provisionong software / Paas which I selfhost on a digital ocean host: https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io It helps me focus on being productive and not trying to be a hosting provider to myself.
furyofantares 6y ago
I really appreciate this list. It's cool to see how people work, and I'm sure the folks building the services you're using appreciate the kind words. I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I'll explain it in case it's at all representative of other reactions being posted here. I think it's just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I'm imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I'm not currently managing, etc, and I'm not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn't match yours. It's easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it's not solving a problem I personally have. But on the other hand it's hard to imagine getting less than 12/mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it's hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they're using. So I'll skip the judgment about how you're spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.
- oliv__ 6y ago
  The more I read your comment, the less I understood it.
  - abalashov 6y ago
    I understand it very well, and relate closely to the author's mixture of feelings. It's overwhelming and intimidating to be reminded that there's a bunch of stuff you ostensibly should be using, or at least researching and evaluating and deciding not to use.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I'm not sure you should be researching this stuff unless you have a real problem to solve.
      - furyofantares 6y ago
        I think that's what I was trying to say. I don't have any of these problems to solve, so when I read a list of someone else's SaaS it causes a low level anxiety that results in a weird, almost certainly incorrect, gut reaction that this 3 person company probably doesn't need all this.
babik 6y ago
Try zoho. Zoho has lot of breadth and depth being very economical.
powerapple 6y ago
Just to shout out to whimsical.com, I am so happy to use it every time. I tried Linear, the interface is bit too bland to my taste. I am going to give it another try since there are so many good words about it in comments.
albertgoeswoof 6y ago
What are the things you unhappily pay for?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
greenone 6y ago
the linear.app website crashes safari/ios when you zoom in on the first image (the one showing the app)
- dmix 6y ago
  welcome to 2020 the homepage uses server rendered Next.js/React which pushes the boundaries of modern web dev. Not surprising. But I still think it's the future once it's more stable. But I'm biases as a Vue/frontend dev
pistoriusp 6y ago
Sincerely hoping to make this list next year
mattfrommars 6y ago
A bit off topic, does anyone know a guide or a good starting point to build landing page that look that clean and modern. For example the landing page for this website https://savvycal.com/ https://savvycal.com/
- Rastonbury 6y ago
  You can get a template of something similar for less than $20
harrisonjackson 6y ago
For our team, Gitlab's silver tier has been a great bank for the buck. Lots of good project management and infra tools on top of a decent git product.
unixhero 6y ago
I pay for 1TB Onedrive and a valid Ms Office license. ~60USD yearly is ok
unixhero 6y ago
MIRO If I ever grow to a large enough org, I will RUN towards paying for a Miro subscription. I will insist on religious level use of it. It is such a game changer.
designerdonna22 6y ago
Restyaboard has been a game-changer for us. It has helped us organize our employee's workflow and project management.

451 points by frankdilo 6y ago

zanellato19 6y ago

Really nice to see Savycal here. I follow the podcast and wish it a great deal of success :)

frankdilo 6y ago
Love Art or Product as well. Derrick is doing an amazing job.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

leetrout 6y ago

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?

ryanSrich 6y ago
I use linear extensively. It’s the best tool for managing development tasks imo. Takes the best features of JIRA without the horrible UI/UX (linear has workflows, boards, lists, assignments, tags, cycles, projects, etc). It’s also just incredibly simple to start using. They have a free version, so I’d say it’s worth checking out. It has integration with GitHub and Slack, which is about all I need as far as integrating goes. I’ve used both Monday and Asana. I’ve not used Zenhub. Comparing linear to Monday and Asana, I’d say linear is much faster. It’s a native Mac app. It’s also nicer looking than both imo, which is a big deal for me.
codetheweb 6y ago
I’ve used Asana in the past. Compared to Linear, it’s absolutely terrible. It’s super slow, has inconsistent UX, and barely supports keyboard shortcuts. Linear supports keyboard shortcuts for literally everything, is blazing fast, and looks nice. It’s one of the few web apps that I actually enjoying using.
peter_l_downs 6y ago
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 work that way -- our team does so it's very nice. I'd recommend giving it a shot, I think once you actually use the application for about 5 minutes you'll understand if it's worth it or not.
- mchusma 6y ago
  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?
  - peter_l_downs 6y ago
    I do know —- they are not!
jorde 6y ago
Linear founder here. As you pointed out issue tracking and project management tools can get easily out of control if concepts get overcomplicated etc. I can't really say of the other tools but we tried to build Linear to be simple and really fast, and adopt to your needs as your grow (e.g. enable more advanced features as you need them). Linear is free to use for a modest issue count so it's pretty low key to try it out for a project with your team if you want to compare it. And if you end up switching, we have open source import scripts available: https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import If you end up trying us out and need help organizing your team, feel free to contact me jori@linear.app
ohadron 6y ago
Using Linear in a 5-person team since June and we love it. Super fast, flexible and capable. Highly recommended.
kevsim 6y ago
Just to toss another hat in the ring - people who are interested in a tool that has a lot of same performance/hotkey characteristics as Linear but takes a different approach to what a product management tool/issue tracker should be should take a look at Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. We've also got great integrations to Github, Slack, Figma, etc. We've got a pretty generous free tier so you can try it out for quite a while with your team before you need to pay. 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
fadesibert 6y ago
Using Linear on an 8 person team. Refugees from JIRA in the corporate world. Absolutely love it - keeps us on track across time zones. The one piece that's probably missing is a tie in to broader "roadmapping" software - I know what's coming in the next 3 sprints, but we haven't found a way to intuitively tie this to our 12-month roadmap - well automatically anyway.
- peter_l_downs 6y ago
  Maybe https://linear.app/method/roadmap https://linear.app/method/roadmap ? You have to enable it in https://linear.app/YOUR_ORG/settings/roadmap

paxys 6y ago

SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.

mikaelmello 6y ago
> made by a solo indie developer that we're happy to support. That would be a good reason to pay well for a nice product imo.
frankdilo 6y ago
Heard this one before. "Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew (the product we make) for the same price?" Apparently hundreds of people are happy to pay for quality indie software that solves their problems. We are among them.
- jariel 6y ago
  "Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew" No, that's not the argument being made though. The argument is 'why is a team of 3 paying 3x$10 to 'schedule meetings'. There's only 3 people, i.e. a reasonable questioning of the value being made. Honestly, $10 is not that much, but why on earth would it be needed is a fair question.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    They might be scheduling meeting with clients?
  - zimbatm 6y ago
    That's not really the argument either. If you cost $100/hour, it only takes 6 minutes of saved time per month to pay back for it. Plus lost opportunity if a potential customer doesn't schedule the call with you. Reducing the friction to talk to customers is pretty big in my books. The question is if the value you get out of the service is higher than what you pay for.

bamazizi 6y ago

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, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!

frankdilo 6y ago
That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything. We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution. But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage. As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible. [1]: https://mailbrew.com https://mailbrew.com
- aparsons 6y ago
  You may also need to hire more people as you scale. With API-based billing, this is fine as you can still allocate a certain expected revenue per user as a cost. With head-based billing, what used to be a fixed cost now grows linearly, yearly, with headcount.
- maccard 6y ago
  Maybe it's worth waiting until you've scaled your revenue before committing to those outgoings? As someone else mentionrd, 10% of that is for scheduling meetings, with a team of 3!
  - zwayhowder 6y ago

schoolornot 6y ago

No Atlassian products!

lmm 6y ago
I'd pay for Trello, though I'm sure they'll ruin it soon. I'd take a pay cut to never have to use JIRA again.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Honestly was it your managers and the development pipeline you hated or was Jira really to blame here? I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead?
  - lmm 6y ago
    > Honestly was it your managers and the development pipeline you hated or was Jira really to blame here? It was Jira specifically. I've worked in very similar environments with and without Jira, and at a place that migrated onto Jira. > I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead? Trello for the "who's working on what right now" part, even if that leads to having to copy tasks over from another system. For the bug-tracking part... honestly I was happiest using Bugzilla, though I don't know if that even still exists. For the roadmap part, just something like a wiki page, though admittedly a lot of that just comes down to not breaking down your tasks in too much detail too early on.
Irishsteve 6y ago
It's free for up to 10 accounts.

makach 6y ago

"A program worth using is worth buying" - hacker/cracker culture

osamagirl69 6y ago

I am not a big fan of SaaA products, and $500/mo seems like a lot for the utility you are getting, but I just wanted to say I love your site design. I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place

AlphENsign_Tech 6y ago

SaaS (you will happily pay for)

ryanSrich 6y ago

SaaS I happily pay for: - CloudFlare - Roam - Slack - Linear - Geekbot SaaS I’m okay with paying for: - Figma - Gsuite - Gusto - Stripe - Netlify SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice: - AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits) - Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do) - Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)

frankdilo 6y ago
Didn’t know about Geekbot, worth trying?
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  I have a small team (3 people) and we often don’t work the same hours, so it’s nice to hop on Slack and read about what my other colleagues are working on and how I might be able to help. It’s also a great way to eliminate daily standups. I despise pointless meetings, so anything we can do over async text the better.
scrollaway 6y ago
I'm very curious about why you classified your "okay with" lower than the other ones, especially stripe which literally drives your revenue!
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  > Figma Figma isn’t very good. It’s better than sketch for prototyping, but not as good for vector. It’s also web based, so it’s painfully slow. I also think it’s a bit expensive. > Gsuite Google is an evil company, but it’s a choice between giving an evil company money, or using a terrible product (O365). I have to focus on the business, not wondering why Outlook isn’t filtering Spam. So Gsuite it is. > Gusto Gusto is fine really. I contemplated putting this one in the Happily category, but ultimately decided to move it down given that I do think it’s a bit expensive for what you get. > Stripe Stripe’s core payment processing is obviously the best around. Where I have issue with Stripe is in the fees they charge (pretty high), and their new Customer Billing Portal. It’s a half baked product that doesn’t support even slightly complex billing mechanisms. > Netlify Netfliy is a good product, and I enjoy using it, but their pricing is strange. I can host 10 sites for free but it’s $15 per user for a collaborator? Seems weird. I’d happily pay say $30/m for unlimited users.

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

An alternative to Vercel and more budget friendly is AWS Amplify console. Costs just a few cents per build, connects with GitHub and you have multiple environments. I’ve had a decent experience - though far from perfect, justifies the cost.

harrisonjackson 6y ago
We used this for the first time recently and it was delightful. Took 2 minutes to go from nothing to deploying our develop and master branches. It was a bit confusing getting all the per branch/commit deployments behind a password so that added another 10 minutes... Very pleased with it.

plehoux 6y ago

"Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy/pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff." Thanks for the mention Francesco. I'm Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don't hesitate if you have any questions. p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves. [1] https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/

frankdilo 6y ago
Wow. Didn’t know you were such a small team. Cheers
seehafer 6y ago
ETA on further integrations, esp, HubSpot? Sick of paying Front an extra $20/user/mo just for that.
- plehoux 6y ago
  Short term roadmap includes calendar integration with Google/Office 365 (early January) + auto contact syncing with Google/Office 365 (end of January). After, the roadmap is open, but we will probably start working on analytics before new integrations.
IkmoIkmo 6y ago
Just wanted to note a typo ('ither questions') by Rafael in the landing page demo screenshot. Not that it matters much but I'd suggest changing. Cool functionality, which my enterprise company would use it.
skaber 6y ago
Good job @plehoux and team! I'm really please to see your Québec city based SaaS on this list.
winrid 6y ago
Who designed your logo? I like it.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

After reading the comments, whether SaaS is worth it seems to depend on a company's circumstances. A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that's self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building. You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.

the-dude 6y ago
You do realize this reads very much like the infamous Dropbox comment?
qeternity 6y ago
Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. For Gmail, docs and drive, G Suite is an absolute bargain. The user experience you describe above (committing Libre office files to git? have you used Libre office) makes me shudder.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Now that I think of it and other comment said - yea, GSuite + Email for $5/month is a bargain. > Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".
  - slow_donkey 6y ago
    Yeah g-suite is a dam bargain especially since it also gets you conferencing, SSO and is one of the few SaaS you'd truly want to buy and retain.

armatav 6y ago

If you go to that Linear one’s site on an iPhone and zoom in really fast on their image of the todo list client, it immediately restarts your phone.

Sebastian_09 6y ago
It does actually, that’s crazy - if anyone is curious enough to check it out would love to hear why
symlinkk 6y ago
Holy shit, seems like an iOS bug.
pjfin123 6y ago
Is this real? I'm on Android and can't try
- armatav 6y ago
  iOS (current) / Safari
jorde 6y ago
We have quite a bit of SVG animations behind that image so might throw a curveball on Safari
- armatav 6y ago
  Was on current iOS as of writing / on Safari, so makes sense.
etxm 6y ago
Wow, that’s consistent! iOS 14.2
- maltalex 6y ago
  Same on 14.3

jedberg 6y ago

> 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 company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Wow, surely there must be better way to test Stripe integration than just making excuses for paying for stuff you don't need?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I would imagine most Netflix employees were already going to get a Netflix subscription. Setting that up so the company gets some extra QA out of that hardly sounds like a bad idea.
- Drdrdrq 6y ago
  Automated tests rule, but nothing beats end to end tests, not to even mention that they are also eating their own dogfood. Awesome solution, gp, thanks for sharing!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Silhouette 6y ago
  I know of no payment service provider that offers support for testing that is good for fairly normal 2020 software development processes. The standard seems to be offering one separate sandbox environment along with your production one, which you can use to experiment without literally making charges/refunds/etc, and possibly a set of specific credentials you can use to simulate various outcomes such as a declined card or insufficient funds. I know of none that offers enough for stronger safeguards such as automated integration testing as part of a CI system, nor additional sandbox environments so you can for example test a new integration independently without disrupting your main test/staging system that is integrated with the sandbox you get automatically. Just to extend the OP's anecdote, we also have someone signed up for real with every payment method we offer, though more recently we've been looking at moving away from these kinds of payment service entirely for this among other reasons.

bawolff 6y ago

Missive - a comment box on an email to discuss emails. I cant help but wonder why not just send an email.

tehlike 6y ago
The overhead of adding/removing new people and risking potential internal chatter on an external thread.

keithnz 6y ago

really interesting reading the comments where people are trying to cost optimize, and then others justifying the costs by time saved. Seems to me both ways of thinking about this is the wrong mindset. The more important thing is the operational "flow", how your toolsets come together to allow you to operate your business. Trying to micro optimize costs is not terribly useful, one sass offering on it's own may not terribly justify itself, but because they way it connects with other pieces of your operation, the overall flow is better, and therefore justified. It's the difference between an "accountants" way of seeing a business vs systematic thinking. Much important to think about how the "whole" than the parts.

unixhero 6y ago

I pay for a container selfhosting provisionong software / Paas which I selfhost on a digital ocean host: https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io It helps me focus on being productive and not trying to be a hosting provider to myself.

furyofantares 6y ago

I really appreciate this list. It's cool to see how people work, and I'm sure the folks building the services you're using appreciate the kind words. I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I'll explain it in case it's at all representative of other reactions being posted here. I think it's just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I'm imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I'm not currently managing, etc, and I'm not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn't match yours. It's easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it's not solving a problem I personally have. But on the other hand it's hard to imagine getting less than 12/mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it's hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they're using. So I'll skip the judgment about how you're spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.

oliv__ 6y ago
The more I read your comment, the less I understood it.
- abalashov 6y ago
  I understand it very well, and relate closely to the author's mixture of feelings. It's overwhelming and intimidating to be reminded that there's a bunch of stuff you ostensibly should be using, or at least researching and evaluating and deciding not to use.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I'm not sure you should be researching this stuff unless you have a real problem to solve.
    - furyofantares 6y ago
      I think that's what I was trying to say. I don't have any of these problems to solve, so when I read a list of someone else's SaaS it causes a low level anxiety that results in a weird, almost certainly incorrect, gut reaction that this 3 person company probably doesn't need all this.

babik 6y ago

Try zoho. Zoho has lot of breadth and depth being very economical.

powerapple 6y ago

Just to shout out to whimsical.com, I am so happy to use it every time. I tried Linear, the interface is bit too bland to my taste. I am going to give it another try since there are so many good words about it in comments.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

What are the things you unhappily pay for?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

greenone 6y ago

the linear.app website crashes safari/ios when you zoom in on the first image (the one showing the app)

dmix 6y ago
welcome to 2020 the homepage uses server rendered Next.js/React which pushes the boundaries of modern web dev. Not surprising. But I still think it's the future once it's more stable. But I'm biases as a Vue/frontend dev

pistoriusp 6y ago

Sincerely hoping to make this list next year

mattfrommars 6y ago

A bit off topic, does anyone know a guide or a good starting point to build landing page that look that clean and modern. For example the landing page for this website https://savvycal.com/ https://savvycal.com/

Rastonbury 6y ago
You can get a template of something similar for less than $20

harrisonjackson 6y ago

For our team, Gitlab's silver tier has been a great bank for the buck. Lots of good project management and infra tools on top of a decent git product.

unixhero 6y ago

I pay for 1TB Onedrive and a valid Ms Office license. ~60USD yearly is ok

unixhero 6y ago

MIRO If I ever grow to a large enough org, I will RUN towards paying for a Miro subscription. I will insist on religious level use of it. It is such a game changer.

designerdonna22 6y ago

Restyaboard has been a game-changer for us. It has helped us organize our employee's workflow and project management.