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If you're building a startup, you should consider $49/mo to be a trivial expense and just pay it. I'm aware that you'll need to use dozens of services and the c
by pbiggar 11y ago
If you're building a startup, you should consider $49/mo to be a trivial expense and just pay it. I'm aware that you'll need to use dozens of services and the cost may well achieve $1000/mo, even in the early days. Doesn't matter, just pay it.
Startups are about growth. Paying for SaaS allows you to focus on your product and to grow much more quickly and aggressively than you would otherwise. It's silly and wasteful to even think about not spending $49/mo for the kind of leverage you'd get from Algolia.
- hamhamed 11y agoNobody said my startup is going to make it.. I need to test it out on the side, let it run a couple of months before I make a real move. And if it's limiting me on 1000 entries my startup won't be able to work on it's full potential
- biot 11y agoWith anything you're trading money for time. If you don't want to pay their more than fair asking price, then use your time to roll your own solution. It probably won't be as good but, as you say, your business may not succeed so why allocate resources towards the best solution before you've even proven your business model?
- hamhamed 11y agoBecause their solution is KEY to my early stage startup. Fast to iterate, and easy to scale and debug.
- teacup50 11y agoAs someone who bootstrapped a "startup", there are plenty -- PLENTY -- of non-SaaS solutions that: 1) are perpetually licensed. You don't have to worry that they'll disappear on you, or jack up their prices. 2) are cheaper. far, far cheaper. 3) are just as effective. 4) enable growth by: 4a) Being extensible (server-side code execution enables a lot). 4b) Being economical (SaaS chews up a runway like nobody's business). 4c) Building valuable (in the business agility sense) internal expertise. 5) don't incur the overhead of managing accounts for people across a different provider for every service. If you're growing fast, having a single account switch to flip makes a real difference to new-hire integration overhead and effectiveness. Hard dependencies on costly software subscriptions is rarely a net win for a startup.
- robot 11y agoSo in this case you favor installing and maintaining elastic search? I don't think so. It seems it would come with more than $50/month cost in terms of maintenance and hosting time, as well as the extra hassle. There is also the masters of search: https://www.google.com/work/search/products/gss.html#pricing_content https://www.google.com/work/search/products/gss.html#pricing... but looks like the price goes higher when you have a lot of queries. Also you probably can't customize the query result as neatly as algolia
- teacup50 11y agoYes, I'm in favor of installing and maintaing "elastic search". It's not rocket science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Users http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Users
- BadassFractal 11y agoOne thing they all have in common is that they're no longer 2 person shops. When you're at a single digit pre-PMF size, spending time on setting up your infrastructure and tooling is irresponsible. At some point the cost of the SaaS becomes greater than the cost of paying someone to maintain the tool, at which point you can do the switch.