9 ms·

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service

I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you can easily bring that under $50. But I get it. If X tool saves time, why not pay for it? I wouldn't call that frugal though because you are still spending where you can save.

styren 3y ago
Instead of Intercom I can recommend crisp.chat which has a free tier if you can live with only 2 seats.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  tawk.to
MadDemon 3y ago
How does Ubersuggest compare to Ahrefs?
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  I was wondering the same. Ubersuggest has a comparison page[0]. From my understanding it boils down to Ubersuggest being cheaper and most likely enough for what most users will need, but Ahrefs has a larger tool suite (and much higher cost). [0] https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-vs-ahrefs/ https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-vs-ahrefs/
TheCapeGreek 3y ago
I agree. Use one of the OSS password managers to save on 1P. If you have a cloud sync service you already use, KeePassXC + cloud sync will solve having the passwords available everywhere you are. You can even use Syncthing for free (though I'd at least donate once off) since you can use it peer-to-peer between your devices. SEO really needs disruption here on price. Ubersuggest seems decent. On Intercom: OP can probably go into more detail on why Intercom's widget is so much better. If it's just animations and UX, then yeah go find some alternative or self host. What's useful in the self-hosting space is finding either a tool to manage server provisioning & management (e.g. Ploi), or a hosting provider that makes it easy to install (e.g. DO marketplace). Then you're only spending a small fee on the management and only spending on hosting cost (which for a long time can be negligible). Spending some time to DIY with reliable tools (automated where possible) is IMO still preferable to spending this much money if starting from scratch.
- wink 3y ago
  Not a 1Password fan, but if your business hinges on 3$/month you probably shouldn't do business.
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    Looks to me like the 1P biz rate is $7.99 per chair per month, so once you hire employee number 100, you're spending $9600/yr. That shouldn't put you out of business, but still could be spent elsewhere?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pembrook 3y ago
  Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product? I could see if we were talking about a side project with no commercial intent. But this post is about an indie Saas founder...if a few hundred dollars a month is a barrier to success, then that's a pretty good sign your indie startup isn't starting up. I find these threads endlessly amusing considering that, for hundreds of years, starting a business involved massive investments in real estate, physical equipment, etc. We're living the dream, yet somehow quibbling over spending $10/month on a piece of software. If it saves you just 2 hours, per year, then it's worth it.
  - fhd2 3y ago
    I generally agree, but I'd say it depends. I'm not too surprised that software developers are less likely to spend money on software - they do have another option non-programmers don't have. I'd also not be shocked to hear that trained accountants starting a company are less likely to hire accounting firms than non-accountants. And most software I deal with isn't exactly free of opportunity cost - I dabbled a bit with accounting tools to the point of frustration and time sunk that I decided to roll my own (built around ledger, in case anyone cares) in about a day. Writing my own tool is sometimes faster for me than trying to figure out how to use one that's not designed around my specific needs. Sure, 10$ doesn't seem like much, but all these little invoices can creep up to a non-trivial sum.
stewartmcgown 3y ago
I used to be CTO of an Uber Eats style service that ran on hosting costs of about £100pm. Thousands of orders every few days, real time driver tracking, self hosted invoice generation, the works. Hetzner servers, Docker Swarm and Cloudflare for the tech.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Hetzner servers It is truly amazing to me the value that is provided by renting hardware instead of VPSes. As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure instead of buy into a cloud provider's infrastructure.
  - niemandhier 3y ago
    I did that once and the data center burned down. Sure I could have the service spread over several centers and build distributed backups etc. In the end self hosting and self managing is a money / time trade off, especially for a side gig I’d us SAS and managed solutions. The one thing one has to make sure off is to not get locked in with a particular provider, so knowing how to do everything yourself is a very valuable skill.
    - number6 3y ago
      To be fair, Datacenter burning down is pretty much on the bad luck side of risk management. It's in the same category as your distribution center being hit by an earthquake... I'd guess it wouldn't happen again, but who knows...
    - nik736 3y ago
      A Google Cloud region in France was also unavailable for months (or still is?) due to flooding/electricity. But no one is talking about it.
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        Didn't that happen from someone leaving a sink on or something, causing flooding and then the UPS batteries to short and explode? I was there when someone at AWS accidentally unplugged an entire region. Shit happens, it doesn't matter where it's hosted. People act like the cloud is infallible or something. You're literally sending lightning bolts worth of electricity through bricks of metal. Anything can happen.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!
- commonlisp94 3y ago
  People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The "shared server" concept is funny because as much as it seems old fashioned, it embodies the spirit of all the modern things: * Serverless - in that you don't need to do server admin * Online IDE - CPanel lets you make changes online to your code * Continuous Integration - When you save the file online it is in immediate production * Branching - you can copy a folder from one subdomain folder to another - this effectively gives you a poor man's git and environments in one swoop! It is like a REPL of web dev. Nothing can come close to it, because once you made your changes they are live, there is no infuriatingly slow publishing step.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I think it's kind of sad and insane that people seem to have forgotten (or came into the industry too late to know) that it's possible to build fun and useful things that way. I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years. It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost. For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly. On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
js4ever 3y ago
Or use managed chatwoot instance for $10/month, so you don't have the devops burden https://elest.io/open-source/chatwoot https://elest.io/open-source/chatwoot
oriettaxx 3y ago
Exactly! 3.375$ a year: call it frugal...
julianeon 3y ago
There are a lot of use cases for which you can’t actually save by kicking out Ahrefs. Of all the tools here it is the hardest one to replicate. I agree w the rest - but in many situations Ahrefs is not replaceable.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  What does it provide that is so special?
  - julianeon 3y ago
    Its provides detailed analytics on the popularity of different websites and the keywords that people search for; it goes really, really deep on this, much deeper than you can go through manual google searches and various scripts. You can easily recreate Vercel on your own if you're willing to forgo some convenience, for example; there's no equivalent to that for Ahrefs - you can't realistically 'roll your own' or code your own Ahrefs. The web largely works on an advertising model, and Ahrefs is what tells you what has value for advertising purposes and what people will visit, or are visiting now. If you're doing something simple, it may not matter. If you're not, Ahrefs is indispensable.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      I'm not sure I buy that. Surely ahrefs is depending on the data that Google provides and if that is the case, there can be a competitor.
waylandsmithers 3y ago
Agreed- I'd be interested if someone could figure out how to do this on $0 for some period of time on sign up credits and free tiers

styren 3y ago

Instead of Intercom I can recommend crisp.chat which has a free tier if you can live with only 2 seats.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
tawk.to

MadDemon 3y ago

How does Ubersuggest compare to Ahrefs?

TheCapeGreek 3y ago
I was wondering the same. Ubersuggest has a comparison page[0]. From my understanding it boils down to Ubersuggest being cheaper and most likely enough for what most users will need, but Ahrefs has a larger tool suite (and much higher cost). [0] https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-vs-ahrefs/ https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-vs-ahrefs/

TheCapeGreek 3y ago

I agree. Use one of the OSS password managers to save on 1P. If you have a cloud sync service you already use, KeePassXC + cloud sync will solve having the passwords available everywhere you are. You can even use Syncthing for free (though I'd at least donate once off) since you can use it peer-to-peer between your devices. SEO really needs disruption here on price. Ubersuggest seems decent. On Intercom: OP can probably go into more detail on why Intercom's widget is so much better. If it's just animations and UX, then yeah go find some alternative or self host. What's useful in the self-hosting space is finding either a tool to manage server provisioning & management (e.g. Ploi), or a hosting provider that makes it easy to install (e.g. DO marketplace). Then you're only spending a small fee on the management and only spending on hosting cost (which for a long time can be negligible). Spending some time to DIY with reliable tools (automated where possible) is IMO still preferable to spending this much money if starting from scratch.

wink 3y ago
Not a 1Password fan, but if your business hinges on 3$/month you probably shouldn't do business.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Looks to me like the 1P biz rate is $7.99 per chair per month, so once you hire employee number 100, you're spending $9600/yr. That shouldn't put you out of business, but still could be spent elsewhere?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pembrook 3y ago
Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product? I could see if we were talking about a side project with no commercial intent. But this post is about an indie Saas founder...if a few hundred dollars a month is a barrier to success, then that's a pretty good sign your indie startup isn't starting up. I find these threads endlessly amusing considering that, for hundreds of years, starting a business involved massive investments in real estate, physical equipment, etc. We're living the dream, yet somehow quibbling over spending $10/month on a piece of software. If it saves you just 2 hours, per year, then it's worth it.
- fhd2 3y ago
  I generally agree, but I'd say it depends. I'm not too surprised that software developers are less likely to spend money on software - they do have another option non-programmers don't have. I'd also not be shocked to hear that trained accountants starting a company are less likely to hire accounting firms than non-accountants. And most software I deal with isn't exactly free of opportunity cost - I dabbled a bit with accounting tools to the point of frustration and time sunk that I decided to roll my own (built around ledger, in case anyone cares) in about a day. Writing my own tool is sometimes faster for me than trying to figure out how to use one that's not designed around my specific needs. Sure, 10$ doesn't seem like much, but all these little invoices can creep up to a non-trivial sum.

stewartmcgown 3y ago

I used to be CTO of an Uber Eats style service that ran on hosting costs of about £100pm. Thousands of orders every few days, real time driver tracking, self hosted invoice generation, the works. Hetzner servers, Docker Swarm and Cloudflare for the tech.

nordsieck 3y ago
> Hetzner servers It is truly amazing to me the value that is provided by renting hardware instead of VPSes. As long as you're willing to roll your own infrastructure instead of buy into a cloud provider's infrastructure.
- niemandhier 3y ago
  I did that once and the data center burned down. Sure I could have the service spread over several centers and build distributed backups etc. In the end self hosting and self managing is a money / time trade off, especially for a side gig I’d us SAS and managed solutions. The one thing one has to make sure off is to not get locked in with a particular provider, so knowing how to do everything yourself is a very valuable skill.
  - number6 3y ago
    To be fair, Datacenter burning down is pretty much on the bad luck side of risk management. It's in the same category as your distribution center being hit by an earthquake... I'd guess it wouldn't happen again, but who knows...
  - nik736 3y ago
    A Google Cloud region in France was also unavailable for months (or still is?) due to flooding/electricity. But no one is talking about it.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Didn't that happen from someone leaving a sink on or something, causing flooding and then the UPS batteries to short and explode? I was there when someone at AWS accidentally unplugged an entire region. Shit happens, it doesn't matter where it's hosted. People act like the cloud is infallible or something. You're literally sending lightning bolts worth of electricity through bricks of metal. Anything can happen.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Battle of the SaaSes! The challenge: Can you build a profitable SaaS without giving money to other SaaSes!

commonlisp94 3y ago
People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The "shared server" concept is funny because as much as it seems old fashioned, it embodies the spirit of all the modern things: * Serverless - in that you don't need to do server admin * Online IDE - CPanel lets you make changes online to your code * Continuous Integration - When you save the file online it is in immediate production * Branching - you can copy a folder from one subdomain folder to another - this effectively gives you a poor man's git and environments in one swoop! It is like a REPL of web dev. Nothing can come close to it, because once you made your changes they are live, there is no infuriatingly slow publishing step.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I think it's kind of sad and insane that people seem to have forgotten (or came into the industry too late to know) that it's possible to build fun and useful things that way. I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years. It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost. For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly. On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

js4ever 3y ago

Or use managed chatwoot instance for $10/month, so you don't have the devops burden https://elest.io/open-source/chatwoot https://elest.io/open-source/chatwoot

oriettaxx 3y ago

Exactly! 3.375$ a year: call it frugal...

julianeon 3y ago

There are a lot of use cases for which you can’t actually save by kicking out Ahrefs. Of all the tools here it is the hardest one to replicate. I agree w the rest - but in many situations Ahrefs is not replaceable.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
What does it provide that is so special?
- julianeon 3y ago
  Its provides detailed analytics on the popularity of different websites and the keywords that people search for; it goes really, really deep on this, much deeper than you can go through manual google searches and various scripts. You can easily recreate Vercel on your own if you're willing to forgo some convenience, for example; there's no equivalent to that for Ahrefs - you can't realistically 'roll your own' or code your own Ahrefs. The web largely works on an advertising model, and Ahrefs is what tells you what has value for advertising purposes and what people will visit, or are visiting now. If you're doing something simple, it may not matter. If you're not, Ahrefs is indispensable.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    I'm not sure I buy that. Surely ahrefs is depending on the data that Google provides and if that is the case, there can be a competitor.

waylandsmithers 3y ago

Agreed- I'd be interested if someone could figure out how to do this on $0 for some period of time on sign up credits and free tiers