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As 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 th

As 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 ago
So 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    One 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.
    - hobofan 11y ago
      And that point can come very early. We are handling a lot of data/user. We are hosting our ES for ~$80/mo which would cost $650/mo at Algolia for the same volume. Same for logging data. We are hosting our own EHK (Heka instead of Logstash) stack for ~$50/mo (few hours of setup and ~10mins/month of maintenance) which would cost us about $500/mo if we would have stayed with Loggly (and ours will stay at about the same price well into the volume of Loggly's $1k/mo plan). As a bootstraping startup you don't have the luxury to throw money at problems and a lot of SaaS are not well suited if you have a heavy data workload.
      - briandear 11y ago
        with that sort of volume, you guys must be making millions!
    - teacup50 11y ago
      > spending time on setting up your infrastructure and tooling is irresponsible Investing in our infrastructure and tooling early-on was probably the most responsible thing I did.
briandear 11y ago
$49 per month is 'costly'? That's barely 1/2 an hour of developer time. That's an absolute bargain. If it took a developer 6 hours to build an in house solution, that just cost as much as a year of Algolia. And that dev time doesn't even include the servers or maintenance costs. $49 is nothing. It would actually be irresponsible to not spend that amount because you'd be focusing reasorces wastefully by building something you needn't build. It's like people who hire a Dev Ops guy when Heroku would cost them $2000 per month; instead they'll pay AWS $1500 and then a full time salary to manage it. Or, to put it into perspective; $49 per month is probably hundreds less than a typical ping-ping startup spends on microbrews for the beer fridge.
- teacup50 11y ago
  An in-house solution and the resulting acquired expertise may provide a great deal more inherent value. And what's irresponsible is using software (languages, architecture, deployment methods) so inefficient that you need to spend $2000/mo to host a minimal deployment.

robot 11y ago

So 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  One 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.
  - hobofan 11y ago
    And that point can come very early. We are handling a lot of data/user. We are hosting our ES for ~$80/mo which would cost $650/mo at Algolia for the same volume. Same for logging data. We are hosting our own EHK (Heka instead of Logstash) stack for ~$50/mo (few hours of setup and ~10mins/month of maintenance) which would cost us about $500/mo if we would have stayed with Loggly (and ours will stay at about the same price well into the volume of Loggly's $1k/mo plan). As a bootstraping startup you don't have the luxury to throw money at problems and a lot of SaaS are not well suited if you have a heavy data workload.
    - briandear 11y ago
      with that sort of volume, you guys must be making millions!
  - teacup50 11y ago
    > spending time on setting up your infrastructure and tooling is irresponsible Investing in our infrastructure and tooling early-on was probably the most responsible thing I did.

briandear 11y ago

$49 per month is 'costly'? That's barely 1/2 an hour of developer time. That's an absolute bargain. If it took a developer 6 hours to build an in house solution, that just cost as much as a year of Algolia. And that dev time doesn't even include the servers or maintenance costs. $49 is nothing. It would actually be irresponsible to not spend that amount because you'd be focusing reasorces wastefully by building something you needn't build. It's like people who hire a Dev Ops guy when Heroku would cost them $2000 per month; instead they'll pay AWS $1500 and then a full time salary to manage it. Or, to put it into perspective; $49 per month is probably hundreds less than a typical ping-ping startup spends on microbrews for the beer fridge.

teacup50 11y ago
An in-house solution and the resulting acquired expertise may provide a great deal more inherent value. And what's irresponsible is using software (languages, architecture, deployment methods) so inefficient that you need to spend $2000/mo to host a minimal deployment.