15 ms·

SaaS services behind a startup

132 points by jjzhiyuan 4y ago

asim 4y ago
So many tools. What really frustrates me about stuff like this, every new employee brings in their own biases and tools they prefer to work with, then there's a battle over working with an existing process or replacing it for the new shiny thing which isn't really that much better. The majority of time you just spend learning these new tools only to then be replaced by something else. What's worse, every tool is some additional per head user cost. Personally I get the feeling like a bundled GSuite plus some chat and Jira workflow does the job but maybe I'm just old school.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  I agree. I'm not sure how the other fields are, but in the data universe things are going nuts. Too many new tools, algorithms, frameworks, dataviz apps, its crazy. Most of the time, we spent 2-5 days to properly learn some new tool for 1 job and then never look at it again. That's frustrating.
- Octabrain 4y ago
  Well, the same case exists the other way around: Companies using stuff that in theory just """works"""™ that is painful and clearly not the best choice but still using it for lack of knowledge, corporate folklore, someone with ego and power decided it or any combination of the previous.
- lbriner 4y ago
  Yeah. The one that always gets me is the arguments about task tools Trello vs Jira vs Azure Devops etc. They pretty much all do the same thing but there will always be someone who picks one specific feature of one specific tools like its the deal-winner even though they could easily live without it. As for marketing tools, don't get me started, a lot of them I find morally unpleasant (well, the ones that provide leads for a fee, which are mostly obtained indirectly without consent or knowledge) I think lots of people think that if there is a tool, they must use it instead of Excel/OpenOffice whatever at $30/person/month just because it is a bit nicer.
- ksec 4y ago
  >So many tools. Which is why, despite HN / Social Media or literally everyone working in Tech thinks we need decentralise or more tools for each function. What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. > but maybe I'm just old school. The whole tech industry is hype driven and worst than fast fashion.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    For what should be a reasonably mature industry, we sure do fuss a lot about how to do things we should probably have solutions for. I spend a decent amount of time split between different projects, old and new, and there is something very nice about a well-appointed mature framework that you don't get from cutting-edge bare-bones approaches.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. So, Microsoft Office?
  - asim 4y ago
    > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. I agree. I think a lot of this should just be done by one tool. Unfortunately the incumbents like Google and Microsoft are doing a poor job beyond the initial software they built e.g Google Cloud Dashboard takes 5 seconds between page loads, this is horrendous. To be honest I think if you scrapped a lot of the UI functionality and made it CLI based it would work far better. If all SaaS tools were reimagined as a singular CLI tool, maybe even in a UI, it would be better than what we have.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Each tool likely contains a little bit of business logic and domain knowledge too, so you end up spreading your company's procedures and business rules throughout all these little SaaS products. On one hand you have savvy non-technical people running entire businesses from a complex spreadsheet, and I think the SaaS Rube Goldberg is what you have in the other hand.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  If you were old school you wouldn't recommend Jira but self hosted Redmine
  - kirbez 4y ago
    [dead]
- remus 4y ago
  In the context of it being a 20 person company I don't think what they've listed is excessive. Each person is likely going to be using a subset of those tools in their day to day work. Just spit balling, but say they had 2 designers who spent most of their day in Excalidraw/Figma/Retool. For them that's a great investment as it makes their lives way easier. Same deal with developers and github/sourcegraph/... and marketing with intercom/mailchimp/... No doubt they could consolidate some things and just completely do without others, but overall it doesn't seem that crazy.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  The question is if that is better or worse than in house tools? If a company uses some analytics tool (knowledge that might be reusable at other jobs) it seems better to pick that up than to learn an in house one (knowledge which will definitely not be reusable).
swyx 4y ago
incredible transparency, thank you for sharing! paying $70 for intercom but $20 for mailchimp. interruption marketing vs permission marketing. when i first land on your page the fake intercom chat is the first thing to put me off, i gotta ask if you think its actually worth it? last question on the content productivity. 3-5 articles per week is very good. what kind of traffic does that get you, and have you considered “slow down to get 10x results” type experiments?
- can16358p 4y ago
  Yup. That Intercom overlay is always more of an annoyance than a feature. Intercom is immediately -1 for me as a potential customer.
  - joshmlewis 4y ago
    What? That's insane. It's literally an almost immediate portal to talking to an actual human on the other side. All companies may not care about response times but a lot of startups make it a goal to relentlessly cut down on response time to where it's mere minutes.
    - swyx 4y ago
      except that it inconveniences the 99.5% (real number from previous company) of users who dont interact with it, and those that do often get stonewalled into the “it looks like nobody is there right now, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you” flow. we all understand the premise but this form factor has in practice failed to deliver. instead if people want instant response they tend to join the public slack or discord. you know, the apps actually built for community chat.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        It works well for switched on companies. I've spoken to very small SAAS company CEOs before via it, which is effective. Maybe something to discard over time.
    - 4y ago
cultofmetatron 4y ago
1,183 isn't really that bad for a 20 person startup. we spend that much on our cloud and we have 5 people.
- maze-le 4y ago
  Yep, it's around 60 bucks per person per month. Compared to a developer salary of around 6000$/M (in central Europe) it's not even 1% of the salary cost per person. A hand-wavey calculation I know, most developers in the US make more than that, there are additional costs per person and there are not only developers in an organization that size. But All in all, it's not that much...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _tardigrade 4y ago
    it's not that easy to hire decent SWE from central/east europe for $6000/month anymore
    - maze-le 4y ago
      Hmmm... Then I should consider negotiating a pay raise or switching jobs in the near future
jraines 4y ago
Free tier for a lot of these; if it works for you great, I guess just be ready to need/want to upgrade a bunch, grouped around the same time, at which point this goes up 5x, conservatively
- nlh 4y ago
  Yeah this is a freemium product’s dream post. Of course these products are all inexpensive because of the free tier, which is the point. Segment, for example, can VERY quickly become a $2000/month expense just by itself when you get any sort of volume. (BTW I love Segment and am a happy user - just pointing out that it gets expensive ;)
can16358p 4y ago
Is paying that much for Linear and Grammarly really worth it? While $1183 is already cool, I think it can easily go sub-1000 (not really important though as SaaS expenses are negligible compared to many other expenses)
- sva_ 4y ago
  I don't know how I'd feel if my employer told me to use Grammarly.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    A little dumb, surely.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > I don't know how I'd feel if my employer told me to use Grammarly. I mean, everyone makes mistakes, or words things in ways that can get a bit long winded etc. I don't think it's that much different from having spell checking on in your word processor or browser. Seems like a nice tool. On a related note, Hemingway seems nice as well: https://hemingwayapp.com/ https://hemingwayapp.com/
  - mtremsal 4y ago
    I’d be concerned about the security risk caused by their browser plugin, especially given their track record. Grammarly is usually a complete no-go once you have an infosec team.
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
This is possibly misleading as this 20-Person company is obviously not yet at a phase where they have a mature customer acquisition pipeline. It's obvious because they're on basic or free tiers for all these services. As soon as they try to land a customer with any sort of compliance requirements, the pricing tiers on nearly all these SaaS plans will jump significantly. It's unrealistic to expect to pay less than one full time employee for basically all your supporting infrastructure. SaaS is definitely great to start out, as demonstrated here, but the danger is lock-in and expense creep, which can kill otherwise strong companies. Burn cash to accelerate but always have an escape hatch ready for when you need to tighten the purse strings.
- nickfromseattle 4y ago
  Intercom alone will cost more than $1,183 once they roll off the 12 month startup plan. We migrated to Crisp and are much happier @ $99/month.
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    Look at ChatWoot[1] too. It has a an OpenSource[2] self-host option. They claim to be a customer engagement suite, an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. I have no relationship with them. 1. https://www.chatwoot.com/ https://www.chatwoot.com/ 2. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
- mritchie712 4y ago
  especially true on Segment. We're using Posthog so we have an escape hatch.
  - cpursley 4y ago
    How do you like Posthog so far? Seems pretty compelling.
    - mritchie712 4y ago
a_k_p 4y ago
Great to see OSlash as a part of the stack. Thank you Bytebase team
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  Are you part of the OSlash team? If so, how do I delete my account? Gave it a try and decided it's not the right fit for me, but I can't seem to find where I'm able to delete my account.
- tianzhou 4y ago
  It's a great service. Everyone on the team loves it.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Based on the title I thought this was going to be an article ridiculing companies with this number of SaaS services. It feels like they're really stretching the number of tools they're using for this article. I find it hard to believe they're actually using all these tools on a regular basis. Excalidraw (???), multiple analytics tools, multiple hosting providers, Cloudflare, Algolia (Their docs appear to be using Docusaurus which comes with Algolia out of the box, so ???), multiple messaging tools, +more. > The R&D team of just over 10 members releases a new version every two weeks, and each version has 100 to 150 PRs submitted. Uhh, what? 2w = 10d 100 / 10 = 10 The team is putting up a minimum of 10 PRs a day? How do they have time to put up so many PRs and then also review other people's? These PRs must be tiny.
- sva_ 4y ago
  > These PRs must be tiny. Mostly, for sure https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Acl...
- tianzhou 4y ago
  Author here >> I find it hard to believe they're actually using all these tools on a regular basis. We do rely on all mentioned tools, though for some tools, we only use them occasionally due to their nature (e.g. we don't need to visit Pulley every day to manage equities). >> Excalidraw (???) Oh, Excalidraw Plus >> Their docs appear to be using Docusaurus which comes with Algolia out of the box, so ??? The Algolia part is correct, while we are Vue based, so we built our own and also implement some special markdown syntax to facilitate tech writing https://www.bytebase.com/docs/document-write-guide https://www.bytebase.com/docs/document-write-guide >> The R&D team of just over 10 members releases a new version every two weeks, and each version has 100 to 150 PRs submitted. It's an open source project https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase. And most are small PRs. Here is our review guide line: https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/blob/main/docs/code-review-guide.md https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/blob/main/docs/code-rev...
  - tootie 4y ago
andyjohnson0 4y ago
> 20-Person Startup, 30 SaaS Services The way I look at it is that's 1.5 external dependencies per person. How do they even remember what they're using, never mind pay for it?
- Jaygles 4y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity for a new SaaS product
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Look at it another way: if each dependency makes them twice as efficient at each task, they're twice as efficient at everything with fewer people. Doubles efficiency and reduces overhead for a fraction of the cost.
danwee 4y ago
Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, but this whole "Don't build it yourself, buy it. Focus on your own business, and whenever you need something extra, use a Saas" seems to me like an anti-pattern. I cannot back it up, it's a gut feeling. Now, if somehow your people need Figma, you are not going to build it yourself (that would be crazy). But perhaps the question to ask is "Do you actually need Figma?". If your business absolutely depends on how your UI/UX looks and feels, then sure, designers in your company have a powerful voice and, indeed, Figma may be a very valuable tool. But I don't think Bytebase needs Figma. Sure, their designers will probably need to work with prototypes and designs, but the whole thing is not essential to the business imho. Same goes for Linear, Neat, Sourcegraph, and a few others. And my argument is not, the money ($1K/month should be something any SaaS with decent revenue can easily afford), my argument is dependencies: why on Earth would I want to build a product with some many dependencies? I don't know. Building a product with so many dependencies feels very amateur, error prone, and prone to instability. Again, it's just a gut feeling from some old dude that has been doing software since the late 90s. Maybe it's just the way things are done nowadays.
- samsolomon 4y ago
  I guess it depends on the needs of a business. But any business that has the money to pay $100,000+/yr for a product designer should be able to pay $500/yr for an Enterprise Figma license. I would perhaps look at it from the standpoint—is $XXX/yr going to make my $XXX,XXX/yr employee more at least that much more productive?
- ajgrover 4y ago
  Counter argument: if they’re paying designers, why would they not pay for the tools that enable them to be most productive? Figma is a small cost, relatively. Asking them to use a tool that’s worse is like hiring a developer and refusing to pay for a Jetbrains subscription, the tool is worth way more than the pennies saved.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  I agree. All of these costs add up and it leads to bad spending habits. If you are a small pre-revenhe startup. instead of using Linear/Atlassian, use Excel. Instead of Intercom, just have prospects/clients send you an email or fill out a form. Instead of AWS, use a VPS or dedicated server. Instead of Hubspot, just hand craft HTML emails and use Amazon SES to send them to your list.
xzghfat 4y ago
commeny
ex3ndr 4y ago
We pay 160$ alone for Vercel, how they are 20-person startup when they have just a one license?
- swyx 4y ago
  maybe because only like 3-4 of them actually touch the marketing site?
ryanSrich 4y ago
Im really curious about the render cost. We’re a 5 person startup and spend around $1,300/month on Heroku. Is the cost savings really that significant? Perhaps our SaaS apps are drastically different?
- cpursley 4y ago
  Nearly any stack is going to be cheaper on render.com vs heroku.
remote_phone 4y ago
I worked at a 5000 person tech company and it was a mish mash of different services. It may have seemed smart but learning so many different interfeces, literally dozens, was exhausting. When I was at another bigger company with a better devex investment, all of the internal tooling has similar look and feel and felt a lot better. When you’re a startup I understand you can’t invest in devex but there is a point where investing in your own tools makes a huge difference to internal productivity.
theGnuMe 4y ago
You should only build software tools that at the right level of abstraction to deliver your product. Building APIs for anything else is a waste of time unless there is a general absence of those tools in the marketplace. If there is or existing tools are overpriced, slow or otherwise untenable, then maybe you should work on tools for that market instead. Otherwise, after product market fit and as you scale you can go down the abstraction hierarchy to optimize cost of goods sold.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
If you're starting from scratch, I recommend GitLab for hosting your code. They have dozens of extra features you don't have to use, but you will want as you grow. GitHub has only very slowly been adding similar features over time, and while their interface is much nicer, GitLab just has everything baked in from day 1 and has had a much longer head start on getting integration right.
ranuzz 4y ago
Interesting to see no sales or CS section in the tools categorization. I see there is an enterprise plan and contact us link though.
yamtaddle 4y ago
How do people handle account management with all these damn SaaS, at small-but-big-enough-that-it's-kinda-a-problem companies? Just checklists and a lot of clicking through web UIs? Asking for a friend.
- fragmede 4y ago
  The answer at 500 or 5000 people is SSO but at thirty people? Yeah. Just hire an admin to help with that kind of stuff.
openplatypus 4y ago
Interesting. We use just a handful of SaaS services and are very happy. Rather than adding services and increasing surface of failure/attack we focus on picking good partners.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
R&D makes it unclear what development-only looks like, the short description for each doesn't separate category between R and D. I guess it's pretty much 90% overlap.
fredwimberg 4y ago

132 points by jjzhiyuan 4y ago

asim 4y ago

So many tools. What really frustrates me about stuff like this, every new employee brings in their own biases and tools they prefer to work with, then there's a battle over working with an existing process or replacing it for the new shiny thing which isn't really that much better. The majority of time you just spend learning these new tools only to then be replaced by something else. What's worse, every tool is some additional per head user cost. Personally I get the feeling like a bundled GSuite plus some chat and Jira workflow does the job but maybe I'm just old school.

boredemployee 4y ago
I agree. I'm not sure how the other fields are, but in the data universe things are going nuts. Too many new tools, algorithms, frameworks, dataviz apps, its crazy. Most of the time, we spent 2-5 days to properly learn some new tool for 1 job and then never look at it again. That's frustrating.
Octabrain 4y ago
Well, the same case exists the other way around: Companies using stuff that in theory just """works"""™ that is painful and clearly not the best choice but still using it for lack of knowledge, corporate folklore, someone with ego and power decided it or any combination of the previous.
lbriner 4y ago
Yeah. The one that always gets me is the arguments about task tools Trello vs Jira vs Azure Devops etc. They pretty much all do the same thing but there will always be someone who picks one specific feature of one specific tools like its the deal-winner even though they could easily live without it. As for marketing tools, don't get me started, a lot of them I find morally unpleasant (well, the ones that provide leads for a fee, which are mostly obtained indirectly without consent or knowledge) I think lots of people think that if there is a tool, they must use it instead of Excel/OpenOffice whatever at $30/person/month just because it is a bit nicer.
ksec 4y ago
>So many tools. Which is why, despite HN / Social Media or literally everyone working in Tech thinks we need decentralise or more tools for each function. What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. > but maybe I'm just old school. The whole tech industry is hype driven and worst than fast fashion.
- ehnto 4y ago
  For what should be a reasonably mature industry, we sure do fuss a lot about how to do things we should probably have solutions for. I spend a decent amount of time split between different projects, old and new, and there is something very nice about a well-appointed mature framework that you don't get from cutting-edge bare-bones approaches.
- mellavora 4y ago
  > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. So, Microsoft Office?
- asim 4y ago
  > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. I agree. I think a lot of this should just be done by one tool. Unfortunately the incumbents like Google and Microsoft are doing a poor job beyond the initial software they built e.g Google Cloud Dashboard takes 5 seconds between page loads, this is horrendous. To be honest I think if you scrapped a lot of the UI functionality and made it CLI based it would work far better. If all SaaS tools were reimagined as a singular CLI tool, maybe even in a UI, it would be better than what we have.
ehnto 4y ago
Each tool likely contains a little bit of business logic and domain knowledge too, so you end up spreading your company's procedures and business rules throughout all these little SaaS products. On one hand you have savvy non-technical people running entire businesses from a complex spreadsheet, and I think the SaaS Rube Goldberg is what you have in the other hand.
orangepurple 4y ago
If you were old school you wouldn't recommend Jira but self hosted Redmine
- kirbez 4y ago
  [dead]
remus 4y ago
In the context of it being a 20 person company I don't think what they've listed is excessive. Each person is likely going to be using a subset of those tools in their day to day work. Just spit balling, but say they had 2 designers who spent most of their day in Excalidraw/Figma/Retool. For them that's a great investment as it makes their lives way easier. Same deal with developers and github/sourcegraph/... and marketing with intercom/mailchimp/... No doubt they could consolidate some things and just completely do without others, but overall it doesn't seem that crazy.
ericmcer 4y ago
The question is if that is better or worse than in house tools? If a company uses some analytics tool (knowledge that might be reusable at other jobs) it seems better to pick that up than to learn an in house one (knowledge which will definitely not be reusable).

swyx 4y ago

incredible transparency, thank you for sharing! paying $70 for intercom but $20 for mailchimp. interruption marketing vs permission marketing. when i first land on your page the fake intercom chat is the first thing to put me off, i gotta ask if you think its actually worth it? last question on the content productivity. 3-5 articles per week is very good. what kind of traffic does that get you, and have you considered “slow down to get 10x results” type experiments?

can16358p 4y ago
Yup. That Intercom overlay is always more of an annoyance than a feature. Intercom is immediately -1 for me as a potential customer.
- joshmlewis 4y ago
  What? That's insane. It's literally an almost immediate portal to talking to an actual human on the other side. All companies may not care about response times but a lot of startups make it a goal to relentlessly cut down on response time to where it's mere minutes.
  - swyx 4y ago
    except that it inconveniences the 99.5% (real number from previous company) of users who dont interact with it, and those that do often get stonewalled into the “it looks like nobody is there right now, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you” flow. we all understand the premise but this form factor has in practice failed to deliver. instead if people want instant response they tend to join the public slack or discord. you know, the apps actually built for community chat.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      It works well for switched on companies. I've spoken to very small SAAS company CEOs before via it, which is effective. Maybe something to discard over time.
  - 4y ago

cultofmetatron 4y ago

1,183 isn't really that bad for a 20 person startup. we spend that much on our cloud and we have 5 people.

maze-le 4y ago
Yep, it's around 60 bucks per person per month. Compared to a developer salary of around 6000$/M (in central Europe) it's not even 1% of the salary cost per person. A hand-wavey calculation I know, most developers in the US make more than that, there are additional costs per person and there are not only developers in an organization that size. But All in all, it's not that much...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _tardigrade 4y ago
  it's not that easy to hire decent SWE from central/east europe for $6000/month anymore
  - maze-le 4y ago
    Hmmm... Then I should consider negotiating a pay raise or switching jobs in the near future

jraines 4y ago

Free tier for a lot of these; if it works for you great, I guess just be ready to need/want to upgrade a bunch, grouped around the same time, at which point this goes up 5x, conservatively

nlh 4y ago
Yeah this is a freemium product’s dream post. Of course these products are all inexpensive because of the free tier, which is the point. Segment, for example, can VERY quickly become a $2000/month expense just by itself when you get any sort of volume. (BTW I love Segment and am a happy user - just pointing out that it gets expensive ;)

can16358p 4y ago

Is paying that much for Linear and Grammarly really worth it? While $1183 is already cool, I think it can easily go sub-1000 (not really important though as SaaS expenses are negligible compared to many other expenses)

sva_ 4y ago
I don't know how I'd feel if my employer told me to use Grammarly.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  A little dumb, surely.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I don't know how I'd feel if my employer told me to use Grammarly. I mean, everyone makes mistakes, or words things in ways that can get a bit long winded etc. I don't think it's that much different from having spell checking on in your word processor or browser. Seems like a nice tool. On a related note, Hemingway seems nice as well: https://hemingwayapp.com/ https://hemingwayapp.com/
- mtremsal 4y ago
  I’d be concerned about the security risk caused by their browser plugin, especially given their track record. Grammarly is usually a complete no-go once you have an infosec team.

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago

This is possibly misleading as this 20-Person company is obviously not yet at a phase where they have a mature customer acquisition pipeline. It's obvious because they're on basic or free tiers for all these services. As soon as they try to land a customer with any sort of compliance requirements, the pricing tiers on nearly all these SaaS plans will jump significantly. It's unrealistic to expect to pay less than one full time employee for basically all your supporting infrastructure. SaaS is definitely great to start out, as demonstrated here, but the danger is lock-in and expense creep, which can kill otherwise strong companies. Burn cash to accelerate but always have an escape hatch ready for when you need to tighten the purse strings.

nickfromseattle 4y ago
Intercom alone will cost more than $1,183 once they roll off the 12 month startup plan. We migrated to Crisp and are much happier @ $99/month.
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Look at ChatWoot[1] too. It has a an OpenSource[2] self-host option. They claim to be a customer engagement suite, an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. I have no relationship with them. 1. https://www.chatwoot.com/ https://www.chatwoot.com/ 2. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
mritchie712 4y ago
especially true on Segment. We're using Posthog so we have an escape hatch.
- cpursley 4y ago
  How do you like Posthog so far? Seems pretty compelling.
  - mritchie712 4y ago

a_k_p 4y ago

Great to see OSlash as a part of the stack. Thank you Bytebase team

xwowsersx 4y ago
Are you part of the OSlash team? If so, how do I delete my account? Gave it a try and decided it's not the right fit for me, but I can't seem to find where I'm able to delete my account.
tianzhou 4y ago
It's a great service. Everyone on the team loves it.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Based on the title I thought this was going to be an article ridiculing companies with this number of SaaS services. It feels like they're really stretching the number of tools they're using for this article. I find it hard to believe they're actually using all these tools on a regular basis. Excalidraw (???), multiple analytics tools, multiple hosting providers, Cloudflare, Algolia (Their docs appear to be using Docusaurus which comes with Algolia out of the box, so ???), multiple messaging tools, +more. > The R&D team of just over 10 members releases a new version every two weeks, and each version has 100 to 150 PRs submitted. Uhh, what? 2w = 10d 100 / 10 = 10 The team is putting up a minimum of 10 PRs a day? How do they have time to put up so many PRs and then also review other people's? These PRs must be tiny.

sva_ 4y ago
> These PRs must be tiny. Mostly, for sure https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Acl...
tianzhou 4y ago
Author here >> I find it hard to believe they're actually using all these tools on a regular basis. We do rely on all mentioned tools, though for some tools, we only use them occasionally due to their nature (e.g. we don't need to visit Pulley every day to manage equities). >> Excalidraw (???) Oh, Excalidraw Plus >> Their docs appear to be using Docusaurus which comes with Algolia out of the box, so ??? The Algolia part is correct, while we are Vue based, so we built our own and also implement some special markdown syntax to facilitate tech writing https://www.bytebase.com/docs/document-write-guide https://www.bytebase.com/docs/document-write-guide >> The R&D team of just over 10 members releases a new version every two weeks, and each version has 100 to 150 PRs submitted. It's an open source project https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase. And most are small PRs. Here is our review guide line: https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/blob/main/docs/code-review-guide.md https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase/blob/main/docs/code-rev...
- tootie 4y ago

andyjohnson0 4y ago

> 20-Person Startup, 30 SaaS Services The way I look at it is that's 1.5 external dependencies per person. How do they even remember what they're using, never mind pay for it?

Jaygles 4y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for a new SaaS product
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Look at it another way: if each dependency makes them twice as efficient at each task, they're twice as efficient at everything with fewer people. Doubles efficiency and reduces overhead for a fraction of the cost.

danwee 4y ago

Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, but this whole "Don't build it yourself, buy it. Focus on your own business, and whenever you need something extra, use a Saas" seems to me like an anti-pattern. I cannot back it up, it's a gut feeling. Now, if somehow your people need Figma, you are not going to build it yourself (that would be crazy). But perhaps the question to ask is "Do you actually need Figma?". If your business absolutely depends on how your UI/UX looks and feels, then sure, designers in your company have a powerful voice and, indeed, Figma may be a very valuable tool. But I don't think Bytebase needs Figma. Sure, their designers will probably need to work with prototypes and designs, but the whole thing is not essential to the business imho. Same goes for Linear, Neat, Sourcegraph, and a few others. And my argument is not, the money ($1K/month should be something any SaaS with decent revenue can easily afford), my argument is dependencies: why on Earth would I want to build a product with some many dependencies? I don't know. Building a product with so many dependencies feels very amateur, error prone, and prone to instability. Again, it's just a gut feeling from some old dude that has been doing software since the late 90s. Maybe it's just the way things are done nowadays.

samsolomon 4y ago
I guess it depends on the needs of a business. But any business that has the money to pay $100,000+/yr for a product designer should be able to pay $500/yr for an Enterprise Figma license. I would perhaps look at it from the standpoint—is $XXX/yr going to make my $XXX,XXX/yr employee more at least that much more productive?
ajgrover 4y ago
Counter argument: if they’re paying designers, why would they not pay for the tools that enable them to be most productive? Figma is a small cost, relatively. Asking them to use a tool that’s worse is like hiring a developer and refusing to pay for a Jetbrains subscription, the tool is worth way more than the pennies saved.
altdataseller 4y ago
I agree. All of these costs add up and it leads to bad spending habits. If you are a small pre-revenhe startup. instead of using Linear/Atlassian, use Excel. Instead of Intercom, just have prospects/clients send you an email or fill out a form. Instead of AWS, use a VPS or dedicated server. Instead of Hubspot, just hand craft HTML emails and use Amazon SES to send them to your list.

xzghfat 4y ago

commeny

ex3ndr 4y ago

We pay 160$ alone for Vercel, how they are 20-person startup when they have just a one license?

swyx 4y ago
maybe because only like 3-4 of them actually touch the marketing site?

ryanSrich 4y ago

Im really curious about the render cost. We’re a 5 person startup and spend around $1,300/month on Heroku. Is the cost savings really that significant? Perhaps our SaaS apps are drastically different?

cpursley 4y ago
Nearly any stack is going to be cheaper on render.com vs heroku.

remote_phone 4y ago

I worked at a 5000 person tech company and it was a mish mash of different services. It may have seemed smart but learning so many different interfeces, literally dozens, was exhausting. When I was at another bigger company with a better devex investment, all of the internal tooling has similar look and feel and felt a lot better. When you’re a startup I understand you can’t invest in devex but there is a point where investing in your own tools makes a huge difference to internal productivity.

theGnuMe 4y ago

You should only build software tools that at the right level of abstraction to deliver your product. Building APIs for anything else is a waste of time unless there is a general absence of those tools in the marketplace. If there is or existing tools are overpriced, slow or otherwise untenable, then maybe you should work on tools for that market instead. Otherwise, after product market fit and as you scale you can go down the abstraction hierarchy to optimize cost of goods sold.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

If you're starting from scratch, I recommend GitLab for hosting your code. They have dozens of extra features you don't have to use, but you will want as you grow. GitHub has only very slowly been adding similar features over time, and while their interface is much nicer, GitLab just has everything baked in from day 1 and has had a much longer head start on getting integration right.

ranuzz 4y ago

Interesting to see no sales or CS section in the tools categorization. I see there is an enterprise plan and contact us link though.

yamtaddle 4y ago

How do people handle account management with all these damn SaaS, at small-but-big-enough-that-it's-kinda-a-problem companies? Just checklists and a lot of clicking through web UIs? Asking for a friend.

fragmede 4y ago
The answer at 500 or 5000 people is SSO but at thirty people? Yeah. Just hire an admin to help with that kind of stuff.

openplatypus 4y ago

Interesting. We use just a handful of SaaS services and are very happy. Rather than adding services and increasing surface of failure/attack we focus on picking good partners.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

R&D makes it unclear what development-only looks like, the short description for each doesn't separate category between R and D. I guess it's pretty much 90% overlap.

fredwimberg 4y ago