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I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life -- almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for: * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting

I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life -- almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for: * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting * Rackspace for incoming email * Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email * Namecheap for domains * A merchant account and Spreedly for payments * ShareASale to run an affiliate program and pay a percentage commission for referred sales * Facebook and Google ads All customers come from ads, referrals or word of mouth. I don't do any social media or outbound sales.

JBlue42 5y ago
>* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like Stripe?
- dangrossman 5y ago
  1. Stripe didn't exist 20 years ago. A merchant account was how you accepted credit cards online before Stripe. 2. Stripe costs more. I pay "interchange plus" which means a small markup over what Visa/MC/Amex charge to processors. A debit card can cost as little as 0.05% to charge, but Stripe will charge you 2.9%. 3. If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. Spreedly is a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault that lets me own the payment data and switch processors at will. If Stripe became cheaper or better in some way for me tomorrow, I could start billing my existing customers through Stripe tomorrow just by changing one token in my code.
  - dbbk 5y ago
    > If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. I don't think this is true, Stripe always work with you to move customer data to another provider
  - make_it_sure 5y ago
    3. it won't work quite like that. you'll get tons of failed payments, probably majority of them
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      My gateway has outages a few times a year, and I have switched to backup gateways including Stripe on those days with no issues.
  - johnx123-up 5y ago
    Spreedly as a wrapper around other payment gateways may add additional fees. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
  - JBlue42 5y ago
    Thanks for the explanation.
cweill 5y ago
Can you please write a blog post or book about your experience? I'm trying to get into solo SAAS, and this kind of post is pure gold for me!
- system2 5y ago
  He has a blog: dangrossman.info He is an active HN'er. You can also find out more about users by clicking their name. Seasoned ones have some sort of profile.
  - ogjunkyard 5y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look at all like a blog and/or I can't find a way to find any posts. Also, that is a rough background with it changing every couple of seconds.
    - system2 5y ago
      I believe the question to pricing strategy can be found in this intro paragraph: "I'm Dan Grossman, the founder of Improvely and W3Counter. In my spare time, I also run Lignin & Light, a shop for hand-crafted gifts, with most items made on my Glowforge Pro."
droobles 5y ago
I aspire to be in the same boat you are – kudos to you! Are the majority of your products physical or digital ecommerce? Or a subscription based automated service? Edit: Looks like you have a great analytics framework, found your blog from another comment. Thanks for sharing your stack with us.
rawoke083600 5y ago
>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to get better statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything over. So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production systems were left without an email service ! EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only one ! I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lordofgibbons 5y ago
  Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
  - rawoke083600 5y ago
    >Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com https://littlebigstats.com). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all. Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one. It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/ Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused ! We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal. For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.
gfauchart 5y ago
If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53? Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings. Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection. Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    Better yet, keep it on Lightsail, it has fixed pricing plans for containers ($7 per mo), VPS ($3.5), database ($15), blob store ($3 per 100GB), and disk ($1 per 10GB). Lightsail can peer into (same region) regular VPC as well for $1 per 100GB ingress+egress.
    - nojito 5y ago
      That’s ridiculously expensive.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        I can’t upvote this enough!
      - ignoramous 5y ago
        Apply my comment in the context of "keep all the backend stuff on AWS." Of course, if one's backend is Scaleway, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, or CoLos then even AWS Lightsail would be ridiculously expensive, but that's not what the thread is about.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more. 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another host and point the domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the domains and hosts the DNS.
llIIllIIllIIl 5y ago
I would like to add [Sentry](https://sentry.io/ https://sentry.io/) to the list. Helps identify the issues your customers have with SaaS and produce better code with a piece of mind.

JBlue42 5y ago

>* A merchant account and Spreedly for payments Can you explain why you go this route instead of something like Stripe?

dangrossman 5y ago
1. Stripe didn't exist 20 years ago. A merchant account was how you accepted credit cards online before Stripe. 2. Stripe costs more. I pay "interchange plus" which means a small markup over what Visa/MC/Amex charge to processors. A debit card can cost as little as 0.05% to charge, but Stripe will charge you 2.9%. 3. If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. Spreedly is a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault that lets me own the payment data and switch processors at will. If Stripe became cheaper or better in some way for me tomorrow, I could start billing my existing customers through Stripe tomorrow just by changing one token in my code.
- dbbk 5y ago
  > If Stripe goes out of business or decides they don't like my business, I'd lose my customers. I don't think this is true, Stripe always work with you to move customer data to another provider
- make_it_sure 5y ago
  3. it won't work quite like that. you'll get tons of failed payments, probably majority of them
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    My gateway has outages a few times a year, and I have switched to backup gateways including Stripe on those days with no issues.
- johnx123-up 5y ago
  Spreedly as a wrapper around other payment gateways may add additional fees. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
- JBlue42 5y ago
  Thanks for the explanation.

cweill 5y ago

Can you please write a blog post or book about your experience? I'm trying to get into solo SAAS, and this kind of post is pure gold for me!

system2 5y ago
He has a blog: dangrossman.info He is an active HN'er. You can also find out more about users by clicking their name. Seasoned ones have some sort of profile.
- ogjunkyard 5y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look at all like a blog and/or I can't find a way to find any posts. Also, that is a rough background with it changing every couple of seconds.
  - system2 5y ago
    I believe the question to pricing strategy can be found in this intro paragraph: "I'm Dan Grossman, the founder of Improvely and W3Counter. In my spare time, I also run Lignin & Light, a shop for hand-crafted gifts, with most items made on my Glowforge Pro."

droobles 5y ago

I aspire to be in the same boat you are – kudos to you! Are the majority of your products physical or digital ecommerce? Or a subscription based automated service? Edit: Looks like you have a great analytics framework, found your blog from another comment. Thanks for sharing your stack with us.

rawoke083600 5y ago

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to get better statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything over. So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production systems were left without an email service ! EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only one ! I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lordofgibbons 5y ago
Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  >Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com https://littlebigstats.com). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all. Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one. It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/ Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused ! We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal. For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.

gfauchart 5y ago

If you use AWS why would you use Namecheap instead of Route53? Even if .com are 4$ cheaper on Namecheap per year. if you have one or two domains, I would prefer simplicity of integration with AWS over small savings. Also is Cloudflare better (or cheaper) than Cloudfront ?

systemvoltage 5y ago
I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection. Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Better yet, keep it on Lightsail, it has fixed pricing plans for containers ($7 per mo), VPS ($3.5), database ($15), blob store ($3 per 100GB), and disk ($1 per 10GB). Lightsail can peer into (same region) regular VPC as well for $1 per 100GB ingress+egress.
  - nojito 5y ago
    That’s ridiculously expensive.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      I can’t upvote this enough!
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      Apply my comment in the context of "keep all the backend stuff on AWS." Of course, if one's backend is Scaleway, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, or CoLos then even AWS Lightsail would be ridiculously expensive, but that's not what the thread is about.
dangrossman 5y ago
1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more. 2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another host and point the domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the domains and hosts the DNS.

llIIllIIllIIl 5y ago

I would like to add [Sentry](https://sentry.io/ https://sentry.io/) to the list. Helps identify the issues your customers have with SaaS and produce better code with a piece of mind.