7 ms·

How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

71 points by vv 12y ago

andyidsinga 12y ago
this is really interesting - i work at an internal incubator at Intel ( new business initiatives ) ...and we don't use nearly this many services in our new ventures - so an interesting contrast for sure. i interesting to see what breaks the 99 barrier
joelhaasnoot 12y ago
While interesting - there's often a free or opensource alternative for these "generic" SaaS services. You'd probably be spending just as much on this list if you used no SaaS products and hired an engineer to either maintain the open source versions or add similar custom functionality to your product/CMS/dashboard/somewhere. If you hired the engineer, you'd probably get the exact functionality you needed too.
- vachi 12y ago
  ahh what!!!! did you see the amount of services provided?? could you please support your statement with some logic
  - joelhaasnoot 12y ago
    So $55k isn't really enough to hire an engineer, but generally speaking many of these services can be setup in a day or two based on open source software or other free tools. I wonder if you made a clear business case based on the features you need, what the result would be. That being said, not having to run it is worth something.
- vv 12y ago
  We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product. Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but if you know of one please send them our way! http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/ http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/
  - teacup50 12y ago
    And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes. I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. At <30 people, all you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
    - kitsune_ 12y ago
      > IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one. Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.
      - teacup50 12y ago
        From experience: That level of maintenance only grows to sysadmin proportions at a scale where you can hire a sysadmin. These systems largely run themselves, indefinitely.
        Alupis 12y ago
        Not to mention there's a lot of SysAdmins out there that will do the job very well for a lot less than $60K a year. You don't need to hire a SysAdmin who used to work on Google sized infrastructure to run your internal startup's IT.
  - karthikv2k 12y ago
    Salary is just a part of the total cost of an employee. You have to take into account: recruiting, office space, food, medical insurance, payroll tax, stock options, etc. Usually these things will be equivalent to the salary.
- tarr11 12y ago
  Hiring an engineer to work on things that are not strategic to your core products or services seems like a distraction. Engineers also cost a lot more than 55k per year. Even if you could, I can't anyone who would be willing to maintain 30+ open source products as part of their job.
digital-rubber 12y ago
That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount. I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full control, self hosted. Also consider the impact of the information you are sharing with all these third parties. Might be a bigger concern then currently estimated. Example, the dead man's snitch, it kind of leaks every time a cronjob runs/fails.
- simonw 12y ago
  $60k/year is 1/3 to 1/2 a developer/sysadmin. If maintaining in-house systems based on open source equivalents of all of those packages would take more than 1/2 a headcount, then they are making the right choice. And even if they could do it all in-house, that's a developer who's not working on the stuff that makes their product distinctive. Running your own email sending / file sharing / customer support tracking / project management / sales lead management software has a massive opportunity cost.
  - digital-rubber 12y ago
    yes that's the tradeoff/investment, where people differ of opinion and I (very technical person, not management/paper pusher), find it more important to have in-house capabilities (even at higher cost) then to simply rely on a third party vendor. Plus that you are not making any third party aware of anything, as you don't need them. And might save you a lot of hassle in the middle of the night and you need vendor support, which generally at such hours could generate even more cost. In my humble opinion, technical pov, the more you do in-house, and the less you rely on third parties, the more freedom the company has. Also any in-house developed product, could be sold, generating income. Also, i believe, that developing your own, gives you a certain knowledge which you don't get if you are simply adopting third party software. It's of course way easier/more clear to calculate ROI when you spending specific amounts instead of investing in knowledge, control and self power. The returns on that can very a lot. But, generally speaking, things are only 'expensive' if you think they are not worth it.
Jonovono 12y ago
Interesting. Cheaper than the salary for an employee and probably together are able to help you do more than a single person.
- Argorak 12y ago
  Also, if the services are important for you and need to run 24/7, you need to calculate at least 3 employees (sick leave, holidays, 24/7 pager duty...).
- rlpb 12y ago
  > Cheaper than the salary for an employee... True, but I wonder how much of an employee's time it takes to manage dealing with all these suppliers, technology integration time with each of them, and changing how these services are used each time a supplier changes its product offering.
  - Jonovono 12y ago
    So you're saying we need a SaaS service for managing other SaaS services and integrating them and keeping up to date with changes! :p actually....
ckluis 12y ago
I was thinking man - they don’t even have 1 really expensive SaaS product on the list… $60k for all those solutions seems very very cheap. Just setting up an open-source alternative to something that costs <$500/yr probably ends up costing you more - without upgrades and management.
- Argorak 12y ago
  I saw the setup of a ticket system (with some tayloring, server and user setup, etc.) quoted at 20k EUR, which I found a reasonable price. That's 20k upfront investment _before anyone has used it_. And this is where the real value of SaaS lies. If I throw away 1000 EUR in seat licensing just for finding out a system seemed nice but doesn't work in the long run, I just saved 19000 EUR.
Alupis 12y ago
There's a lot of unnecessary costs listed. For example, they spend $165.00 on dropbox for the team, but also use Gmail services (meaning they have Google accounts which come with a free 10GB of storage). The tier of MailChimp they use implies their list is in excess of 110,000 subscribers, and since I do a lot of email marketing for my company, I can guess their open rate is probably somewhere in the 10-20% range, so they are throwing money away on emails that go to spam boxes or never get opened/engaged. They use a 3rd party team chat service instead of hosting their own local XMPP service (this is a non-critical service I would wager, and could afford some downtime if the server needed maintenance). All in all, they are spending a lot on things that aren't really necessary. They could bring some of those things in-house and probably save a lot per year as well (low-critical things that would require minimal maintenance). This is not even mentioning the lack of flexibility they get locked into by using only 3rd party solutions. I've seen this at my company for the few external things we do depend on -- you end up building business practices around the 3rd party service, which may or may not be optimal or how you would normally do things. Having that flexibility, and assurance that service X doesn't go away tomorrow really can improve work-flows and peace of mind. Seems their business is based entirely around other 3rd parties ... something that would make my company very nervous to say the least.
- cm2012 12y ago
  Paying someone to micromanage the services to get cost savings would cost at least $60,000 a year and make the company lose focus. There's no way digging into the details of the Mailchimp spend structure, for instance, is worth the time.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    > There's no way digging into the details of the Mailchimp spend structure, for instance, is worth the time. Actually that's one point where you are not correct. For a good email campaign, it's imperative that you manage your list. You need to be looking at stats from the previous campaigns and making changes for future campaigns. If you have a lot of low-engaged/no-engaged emails, you need to try to re-engage them and/or drop them from your list. If you send 1 email a week to an address for 5 years that never opens, you are literally throwing money away. MailChimp (which we use too) has a lot of very good tools to help prune your list and glean a lot of insights into your engagement rates. > Paying someone to micromanage the services to get cost savings would cost at least $60,000 Not necessarily. Download a copy of Openfire XMPP server, stick it on one of your spare windows/*nix boxes in the corner, and it will run un-maintained for years. Just cron/schedule the OS updates automatically and it takes no more effort/skill than logging into a website to manage user accounts. And nobody says they need an expensive seasoned SysAdmin to manage these services. Hire a college student for $15-$18 per hour part time to come in and tidy things up. There are other opportunities to be had with their list of services, such as taking advantage of the drastically lower cost BitBucket (if they must have their source code repo's external). There's certainly a lot of waste listed here.
chatmasta 12y ago
I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint. I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with all of them. I would love to have them all in one accessible place.
- mattm 12y ago
  Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.
  - Argorak 12y ago
    Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.
    - chatmasta 12y ago
      Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely wouldn't work as a side project.
      - Argorak 12y ago
        If the service just provided "add a user, remove a user (hired, fired) and adjust billing appropriately", it would already be worth a lot and wouldn't need full account access. Its mind-boggling how many accounts I still have for companies I don't work for anymore.
mmahemoff 12y ago
It's significant this is a SaaS company using these services. Some of the services have a cost based on team size, while others have a cost based on user base (and usage volume). Services whose cost is f(team size): CircleCI, Trello, Github Services whose cost is f(user base): MixPanel, Moz, Shopify I mention this distinction because the f(team size) services generally offer solid value to any team, being useful and less expensive than paying someone to build the same thing in-house. OTOH the f(user base) products are a lot harder for consumer apps to justify than business apps. They do occasionally offer enterprisey premium features like platinum support, but the main pricing scheme is based on X whatever's per month, and a SaaS company charging lawyers $100/user/month is a lot more likely to afford it than a casual gaming website with a million users and a some ads.
- eitally 12y ago
  And this is precisely why many large enterprises build things in house rather than license commercial tools. It's a lot more palatable to buy 3-5 full time developers to build and support and internal helpdesk than license ServiceNow, etc, for tens of thousands of users.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    There's also considerable risk-aversion at large enterprises. Getting themselves into a position of significant dependence on a SaaS provider can be unappealing for at least two reasons, even if the pricing works for them initially: 1. risk that the pricing gets raised significantly, or the business's employee/customer profile changes in a way that raises the price to them significantly; or 2. risk that the SaaS provider goes out of business, is acquired, pivots, or otherwise significantly changes the service. Building something in-house probably doesn't usually result in a better product up front (and definitely not for less up-front expenditure), but it can reduce some risks and be less constraining to future moves if you own the app.
    - berkay 12y ago
      It doesn't work that way in practice. I've been to more than one enterprise where an in-house developed application was no longer maintained, original developers were not available, and no one knew how the application even worked. There are very high risks in in-house developed applications, particularly if they are not vital for the enterprise (harder to have resources to maintain/enhance). Risk of SaaS provider going out of business or raising prices is no higher than traditional on-premise enterprise vendors (one can argue it's a lot lower). In short, there are risks in all approaches and they need to be managed. Good application architecture help manage those risks regardless of which route is chosen.
deleted 12y ago
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bdcravens 12y ago
I wonder how many of those service are at a "just in case" level? I see a number of products I have/do use, but the team only needed a smaller version of. (for instance, $97 for Github when a $25 org plan would work)
- vv 12y ago
  Since we run two products (both Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards), we end up paying twice for some services like Github.
  - teacup50 12y ago
    I don't understand why you would host your source code externally? You can buy Atlassian Stash, once, for $1800/25 users, and use it forever: https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing
    - Alupis 12y ago
      A lot of companies end up going with something similar to this, since Github Enterprise costs get a little crazy. Stash is good, but if one is looking for an even lower cost option, a lot of people recommend Gitlab now-days. However for some, the task of self-hosting is daunting. I presume that is why some are willing to pay a lot for a hosted solution. BTW -- It's worth noting -- BitBucket is run by Atlassian and allows unlimited free private repos. I think you must pay for teams (EDIT: Free up to 5 users, $10 per month for 10 users, etc, it's basically $1 per user per month over the initial 5 free), but just throwing that out there. It's basically their hosted Stash solution.
    - Argorak 12y ago
      Plus the hidden cost of setting it up. Example: Backing up Stash - while being relatively straight-forward - comes with some amount of scripting and testing (you do test your backup, do you?). Not saying Stash is bad (the contrary), but when evaluating cost, evaluate all cost.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
igvadaimon 12y ago
Sorry for offtopic, but that animation on Muck Rack startpage is one of the slowest I've ever seen. It really freezes.
Wilya 12y ago
It's worth pointing out that, according to their team page [0], Sawhorse Media has zero dedicated backend engineers (apart from maybe their CTO). So, in their case, the alternative would be to hire someone just to manage these things (sysadmin, engineer, or whatever). In this case, I can see why they would make the choice of outsourcing everything. But if you already have an in-house engineering team who is reasonably competent at maintaining services, the tradeoff is probably different. [0] http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/ http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/
- berkay 12y ago
  Agreed. Even when you have an in-house team, there are always other things that are core to your business to do. Growing a team is hard and expensive beyond the cost of the additional engineer. These SaaS tools let startups stay smaller, and that's priceless.

71 points by vv 12y ago

this is really interesting - i work at an internal incubator at Intel ( new business initiatives ) ...and we don't use nearly this many services in our new ventures - so an interesting contrast for sure. i interesting to see what breaks the 99 barrier

joelhaasnoot 12y ago

While interesting - there's often a free or opensource alternative for these "generic" SaaS services. You'd probably be spending just as much on this list if you used no SaaS products and hired an engineer to either maintain the open source versions or add similar custom functionality to your product/CMS/dashboard/somewhere. If you hired the engineer, you'd probably get the exact functionality you needed too.

vachi 12y ago
ahh what!!!! did you see the amount of services provided?? could you please support your statement with some logic
- joelhaasnoot 12y ago
  So $55k isn't really enough to hire an engineer, but generally speaking many of these services can be setup in a day or two based on open source software or other free tools. I wonder if you made a clear business case based on the features you need, what the result would be. That being said, not having to run it is worth something.
vv 12y ago
We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product. Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but if you know of one please send them our way! http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/ http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/
- teacup50 12y ago
  And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes. I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. At <30 people, all you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.
  - kitsune_ 12y ago
    > IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one. Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.
    - teacup50 12y ago
      From experience: That level of maintenance only grows to sysadmin proportions at a scale where you can hire a sysadmin. These systems largely run themselves, indefinitely.
      - Alupis 12y ago
        Not to mention there's a lot of SysAdmins out there that will do the job very well for a lot less than $60K a year. You don't need to hire a SysAdmin who used to work on Google sized infrastructure to run your internal startup's IT.
- karthikv2k 12y ago
  Salary is just a part of the total cost of an employee. You have to take into account: recruiting, office space, food, medical insurance, payroll tax, stock options, etc. Usually these things will be equivalent to the salary.
tarr11 12y ago
Hiring an engineer to work on things that are not strategic to your core products or services seems like a distraction. Engineers also cost a lot more than 55k per year. Even if you could, I can't anyone who would be willing to maintain 30+ open source products as part of their job.

digital-rubber 12y ago

That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount. I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full control, self hosted. Also consider the impact of the information you are sharing with all these third parties. Might be a bigger concern then currently estimated. Example, the dead man's snitch, it kind of leaks every time a cronjob runs/fails.

simonw 12y ago
$60k/year is 1/3 to 1/2 a developer/sysadmin. If maintaining in-house systems based on open source equivalents of all of those packages would take more than 1/2 a headcount, then they are making the right choice. And even if they could do it all in-house, that's a developer who's not working on the stuff that makes their product distinctive. Running your own email sending / file sharing / customer support tracking / project management / sales lead management software has a massive opportunity cost.
- digital-rubber 12y ago
  yes that's the tradeoff/investment, where people differ of opinion and I (very technical person, not management/paper pusher), find it more important to have in-house capabilities (even at higher cost) then to simply rely on a third party vendor. Plus that you are not making any third party aware of anything, as you don't need them. And might save you a lot of hassle in the middle of the night and you need vendor support, which generally at such hours could generate even more cost. In my humble opinion, technical pov, the more you do in-house, and the less you rely on third parties, the more freedom the company has. Also any in-house developed product, could be sold, generating income. Also, i believe, that developing your own, gives you a certain knowledge which you don't get if you are simply adopting third party software. It's of course way easier/more clear to calculate ROI when you spending specific amounts instead of investing in knowledge, control and self power. The returns on that can very a lot. But, generally speaking, things are only 'expensive' if you think they are not worth it.

Jonovono 12y ago

Interesting. Cheaper than the salary for an employee and probably together are able to help you do more than a single person.

Argorak 12y ago
Also, if the services are important for you and need to run 24/7, you need to calculate at least 3 employees (sick leave, holidays, 24/7 pager duty...).
rlpb 12y ago
> Cheaper than the salary for an employee... True, but I wonder how much of an employee's time it takes to manage dealing with all these suppliers, technology integration time with each of them, and changing how these services are used each time a supplier changes its product offering.
- Jonovono 12y ago
  So you're saying we need a SaaS service for managing other SaaS services and integrating them and keeping up to date with changes! :p actually....

ckluis 12y ago

I was thinking man - they don’t even have 1 really expensive SaaS product on the list… $60k for all those solutions seems very very cheap. Just setting up an open-source alternative to something that costs <$500/yr probably ends up costing you more - without upgrades and management.

Argorak 12y ago
I saw the setup of a ticket system (with some tayloring, server and user setup, etc.) quoted at 20k EUR, which I found a reasonable price. That's 20k upfront investment _before anyone has used it_. And this is where the real value of SaaS lies. If I throw away 1000 EUR in seat licensing just for finding out a system seemed nice but doesn't work in the long run, I just saved 19000 EUR.

Alupis 12y ago

There's a lot of unnecessary costs listed. For example, they spend $165.00 on dropbox for the team, but also use Gmail services (meaning they have Google accounts which come with a free 10GB of storage). The tier of MailChimp they use implies their list is in excess of 110,000 subscribers, and since I do a lot of email marketing for my company, I can guess their open rate is probably somewhere in the 10-20% range, so they are throwing money away on emails that go to spam boxes or never get opened/engaged. They use a 3rd party team chat service instead of hosting their own local XMPP service (this is a non-critical service I would wager, and could afford some downtime if the server needed maintenance). All in all, they are spending a lot on things that aren't really necessary. They could bring some of those things in-house and probably save a lot per year as well (low-critical things that would require minimal maintenance). This is not even mentioning the lack of flexibility they get locked into by using only 3rd party solutions. I've seen this at my company for the few external things we do depend on -- you end up building business practices around the 3rd party service, which may or may not be optimal or how you would normally do things. Having that flexibility, and assurance that service X doesn't go away tomorrow really can improve work-flows and peace of mind. Seems their business is based entirely around other 3rd parties ... something that would make my company very nervous to say the least.

cm2012 12y ago
Paying someone to micromanage the services to get cost savings would cost at least $60,000 a year and make the company lose focus. There's no way digging into the details of the Mailchimp spend structure, for instance, is worth the time.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > There's no way digging into the details of the Mailchimp spend structure, for instance, is worth the time. Actually that's one point where you are not correct. For a good email campaign, it's imperative that you manage your list. You need to be looking at stats from the previous campaigns and making changes for future campaigns. If you have a lot of low-engaged/no-engaged emails, you need to try to re-engage them and/or drop them from your list. If you send 1 email a week to an address for 5 years that never opens, you are literally throwing money away. MailChimp (which we use too) has a lot of very good tools to help prune your list and glean a lot of insights into your engagement rates. > Paying someone to micromanage the services to get cost savings would cost at least $60,000 Not necessarily. Download a copy of Openfire XMPP server, stick it on one of your spare windows/*nix boxes in the corner, and it will run un-maintained for years. Just cron/schedule the OS updates automatically and it takes no more effort/skill than logging into a website to manage user accounts. And nobody says they need an expensive seasoned SysAdmin to manage these services. Hire a college student for $15-$18 per hour part time to come in and tidy things up. There are other opportunities to be had with their list of services, such as taking advantage of the drastically lower cost BitBucket (if they must have their source code repo's external). There's certainly a lot of waste listed here.

chatmasta 12y ago

I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint. I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with all of them. I would love to have them all in one accessible place.

mattm 12y ago
Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.
- Argorak 12y ago
  Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.
  - chatmasta 12y ago
    Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely wouldn't work as a side project.
    - Argorak 12y ago
      If the service just provided "add a user, remove a user (hired, fired) and adjust billing appropriately", it would already be worth a lot and wouldn't need full account access. Its mind-boggling how many accounts I still have for companies I don't work for anymore.

mmahemoff 12y ago

It's significant this is a SaaS company using these services. Some of the services have a cost based on team size, while others have a cost based on user base (and usage volume). Services whose cost is f(team size): CircleCI, Trello, Github Services whose cost is f(user base): MixPanel, Moz, Shopify I mention this distinction because the f(team size) services generally offer solid value to any team, being useful and less expensive than paying someone to build the same thing in-house. OTOH the f(user base) products are a lot harder for consumer apps to justify than business apps. They do occasionally offer enterprisey premium features like platinum support, but the main pricing scheme is based on X whatever's per month, and a SaaS company charging lawyers $100/user/month is a lot more likely to afford it than a casual gaming website with a million users and a some ads.

eitally 12y ago
And this is precisely why many large enterprises build things in house rather than license commercial tools. It's a lot more palatable to buy 3-5 full time developers to build and support and internal helpdesk than license ServiceNow, etc, for tens of thousands of users.
- _delirium 12y ago
  There's also considerable risk-aversion at large enterprises. Getting themselves into a position of significant dependence on a SaaS provider can be unappealing for at least two reasons, even if the pricing works for them initially: 1. risk that the pricing gets raised significantly, or the business's employee/customer profile changes in a way that raises the price to them significantly; or 2. risk that the SaaS provider goes out of business, is acquired, pivots, or otherwise significantly changes the service. Building something in-house probably doesn't usually result in a better product up front (and definitely not for less up-front expenditure), but it can reduce some risks and be less constraining to future moves if you own the app.
  - berkay 12y ago
    It doesn't work that way in practice. I've been to more than one enterprise where an in-house developed application was no longer maintained, original developers were not available, and no one knew how the application even worked. There are very high risks in in-house developed applications, particularly if they are not vital for the enterprise (harder to have resources to maintain/enhance). Risk of SaaS provider going out of business or raising prices is no higher than traditional on-premise enterprise vendors (one can argue it's a lot lower). In short, there are risks in all approaches and they need to be managed. Good application architecture help manage those risks regardless of which route is chosen.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bdcravens 12y ago

I wonder how many of those service are at a "just in case" level? I see a number of products I have/do use, but the team only needed a smaller version of. (for instance, $97 for Github when a $25 org plan would work)

vv 12y ago
Since we run two products (both Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards), we end up paying twice for some services like Github.
- teacup50 12y ago
  I don't understand why you would host your source code externally? You can buy Atlassian Stash, once, for $1800/25 users, and use it forever: https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing
  - Alupis 12y ago
    A lot of companies end up going with something similar to this, since Github Enterprise costs get a little crazy. Stash is good, but if one is looking for an even lower cost option, a lot of people recommend Gitlab now-days. However for some, the task of self-hosting is daunting. I presume that is why some are willing to pay a lot for a hosted solution. BTW -- It's worth noting -- BitBucket is run by Atlassian and allows unlimited free private repos. I think you must pay for teams (EDIT: Free up to 5 users, $10 per month for 10 users, etc, it's basically $1 per user per month over the initial 5 free), but just throwing that out there. It's basically their hosted Stash solution.
  - Argorak 12y ago
    Plus the hidden cost of setting it up. Example: Backing up Stash - while being relatively straight-forward - comes with some amount of scripting and testing (you do test your backup, do you?). Not saying Stash is bad (the contrary), but when evaluating cost, evaluate all cost.
  - bdcravens 12y ago

igvadaimon 12y ago

Sorry for offtopic, but that animation on Muck Rack startpage is one of the slowest I've ever seen. It really freezes.

Wilya 12y ago

It's worth pointing out that, according to their team page [0], Sawhorse Media has zero dedicated backend engineers (apart from maybe their CTO). So, in their case, the alternative would be to hire someone just to manage these things (sysadmin, engineer, or whatever). In this case, I can see why they would make the choice of outsourcing everything. But if you already have an in-house engineering team who is reasonably competent at maintaining services, the tradeoff is probably different. [0] http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/ http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/

berkay 12y ago
Agreed. Even when you have an in-house team, there are always other things that are core to your business to do. Growing a team is hard and expensive beyond the cost of the additional engineer. These SaaS tools let startups stay smaller, and that's priceless.