> We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration.
This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.
After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.
Actually technically this is prohibited by stripe. They explicitly ban testing your app in production. We have offered suggestions many times to them, but still no feature here.
I think this is credit card company policy and not specifically Stripe. IIRC, there is some language regarding using your own credit card because it could potentially be used to give yourself a loan. Credit cards have a much higher APR and lower limits for a cash advance. Processing your own cards could be used as an avoidance.
Last time I worked with (on?) a payment processor we got special credit cards that worked like Stripe's test numbers for testing production. I.e. some cards would go through, others would fail with errors specific to each card number.
They were probably one of the most closely guarded pieces of equipment we had since the cards that cleared did so at any merchant so it'd work at point of sale but the vendor would never receive the money.
It's the way the credit system was designed, even before widespread computer networking - based entirely on trust. The customer would bring the card in and the merchant would make a signed carbon copy and call it in or deliver the receipts to the bank every day, which would settle the accounts between banks over a week or so, with the credit card provider carrying some level of liability. This is one of the reasons credit cards weren't accepted most places until networked POS terminals and instantaneous verification made the trust more practical.
Some merchants have their own verification steps in addition to the terminal like Best Buy checking a customer's ID to see if it matches the card and one of these special cards wouldn't fly if anyone actually looked it. It's not like you can walk into a Lamborghini dealership with one like you can with a Centurion card (which has some sort of concierge service for verifying large purchases IIRC).
Presumably, somewhere within the bowels of American Express, there's a test card for testing the Centurion large-payment verification process, where feeding it through a merchant and having them run a verification on it, will get them routed to a mock concierge on Amex's side (or rather, a human concierge diverted to follow a special mock workflow script.)
"Everytime you run your test suite, someone actually gets up for every test case, runs over to the copy machine, and creates physical carbon copies for DHS."
It’s really easy to set this up. Authorizations for changes get routed to the bank of the issuer. It’s no different than rejecting for a bad a zip code, except it’s based purely off the card number.
This is anecdotal, so take it with a grain: I worked for a credit card processor about a decade ago, and it was routine to have the merchant run a penny transaction on the terminal, and refund it post testing to make sure it works.
They're fairly large processing over $40b in annual transaction volumes, and there wasn't any stress about not doing it again post testing (the only stress was the customer wanting a refund for the transaction costs).
If it is a merchant bank, or network requirement, it's either explicitly for card not present transactions, or not well followed. The important factor was handling of the credit card information (PCI DSS compliance).
I believe so, but it requires more infrastructure setup. You'll have to have a prod level test ACH account through Dwolla or something, then watch Stripe interact with that. It's not just as simple as switching card numbers, unless you just want to use your debit card or the company provided one.
What are they really losing there? the stripe fee? they are paying themselves 10 dollars minus the fee... surely it's worth the 60¢/month it costs for absolute certainty that your integrations work for real?
Automated tests rule, but nothing beats end to end tests, not to even mention that they are also eating their own dogfood. Awesome solution, gp, thanks for sharing!
I know of no payment service provider that offers support for testing that is good for fairly normal 2020 software development processes. The standard seems to be offering one separate sandbox environment along with your production one, which you can use to experiment without literally making charges/refunds/etc, and possibly a set of specific credentials you can use to simulate various outcomes such as a declined card or insufficient funds. I know of none that offers enough for stronger safeguards such as automated integration testing as part of a CI system, nor additional sandbox environments so you can for example test a new integration independently without disrupting your main test/staging system that is integrated with the sandbox you get automatically.
Just to extend the OP's anecdote, we also have someone signed up for real with every payment method we offer, though more recently we've been looking at moving away from these kinds of payment service entirely for this among other reasons.
In my experience, some (maybe not Stripe) payment vendors sandbox environments acts slightly different, and these minor issues can break things in production. A payment provider I worked with didn't have a proper way of "storing" cards. But you could create a subscription and bill it whenever you wanted. We didn't want to risk that the subscription stopped working, so we hard coded the subscription to be valid until 9999-12-32 (why not?). This worked fine in the sandbox, but when it was pushed out to production, it didn't work at all, because here in Europe, with the SCA that is enforced by the banks, they refused to create subscriptions that exceeded an unknown amount of time.
> they refused to create subscriptions that exceeded an unknown amount of time
I don’t know anything about payments or the EU regulations but it feels kind of stupid to not specify the maximum amount of time allowed? Is it just bad documentation or does that date/interval have to be secret for some reason?
I would imagine most Netflix employees were already going to get a Netflix subscription. Setting that up so the company gets some extra QA out of that hardly sounds like a bad idea.
"Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy/pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff."
Thanks for the mention Francesco. I'm Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don't hesitate if you have any questions.
p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves.
Short term roadmap includes calendar integration with Google/Office 365 (early January) + auto contact syncing with Google/Office 365 (end of January).
After, the roadmap is open, but we will probably start working on analytics before new integrations.
I reproduced it to happen with just the animated glow behind the todo list. Zooming in and then out to this animation throws my 14.2 XS Max to the lock screen.
Apple mandates WebKit as only allowed browser engine. If a page crashes iOS the error is likely in engine itself so it doesn't really matter what "browser" you actually use.
I really appreciate this list. It's cool to see how people work, and I'm sure the folks building the services you're using appreciate the kind words.
I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I'll explain it in case it's at all representative of other reactions being posted here.
I think it's just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I'm imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I'm not currently managing, etc, and I'm not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn't match yours.
It's easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it's not solving a problem I personally have.
But on the other hand it's hard to imagine getting less than 12/mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it's hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they're using.
So I'll skip the judgment about how you're spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.
I understand it very well, and relate closely to the author's mixture of feelings. It's overwhelming and intimidating to be reminded that there's a bunch of stuff you ostensibly should be using, or at least researching and evaluating and deciding not to use.
I think that's what I was trying to say. I don't have any of these problems to solve, so when I read a list of someone else's SaaS it causes a low level anxiety that results in a weird, almost certainly incorrect, gut reaction that this 3 person company probably doesn't need all this.
SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a "lean operation" can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6/mo, and already does this.
If you cost $100/hour, it only takes 6 minutes of saved time per month to pay back for it. Plus lost opportunity if a potential customer doesn't schedule the call with you. Reducing the friction to talk to customers is pretty big in my books.
The question is if the value you get out of the service is higher than what you pay for.
I've been Calendly user for a while, which addresses the same niche. It doesn't replace scheduling with your internal peers. What it does is enable scheduling with people outside your company without doing any multi-stage dance of listing potential times and getting confirmation, sending out an invite, rescheduling because the even though you clearly stated it, the recipient didn't account for the timezone, dealing with schedule changes and more. My primary use case is coordination with interview candidates, vendors, and customers. A service like this replaces an executive assistant (at least the scheduling part) rather than gsuite.
You really can’t say if they can justify it or not. Only they can. If I can save 15 minutes per day, that would more than pay for $12/month. Time is your most valuable asset.
If you are a 3-person SaaS startup and your team is spending 15+ minutes a day just scheduling meetings among themselves, and need additional software just to manage that process, I'd say that's a problem in itself.
If that's internal meetings, absolutely, that's an issue. But I think a company that size that's trying to iterate on their offering should be booking a lot of meetings to talk with customers and potential customers, and that could easily take 15 mins a day in my experience.
Someone said this in a comment above, but in a 3-person SaaS, everyone works sales. It's likely they're scheduling a huge number of meetings with external folks.
I have 0 meetings with anyone that works with me. We’ve essentially eliminated all internal meetings. At least scheduled recurring ones.
I do, however, have roughly 10 meetings per week. These are with potential clients, existing clients (for feedback), external consultants (legal), investors, etc.
We are a startup, and as such, we all wear 10 different hats. Which means doing sales, admin, business, etc.
Easily. It's about reducing the barrier to entry when someone wants to look at your demo. Every extra scheduling email you send is a chance to lose someone in the funnel. $6 extra a month? Irrelevant. Product probably underpriced because the guy can't demonstrate how many calls he's saving them.
Right. $27/month per user for email filtering and meeting scheduling seems absolutely crazy. While I applied the idea of supporting other small startups, lots of the items in this list seem frivolous!
> You are already paying probably in the $10-20k / month range for per-employee salary.
If you're in the west coast US. This company appears to be italian, so the reality is more like €3k/month, and as they're a startup it might be even less. The other option is looking at it that they're spending 10% of their recurring revenue on SAAS products, which as a 3 person team seems crazy.
really interesting reading the comments where people are trying to cost optimize, and then others justifying the costs by time saved. Seems to me both ways of thinking about this is the wrong mindset. The more important thing is the operational "flow", how your toolsets come together to allow you to operate your business. Trying to micro optimize costs is not terribly useful, one sass offering on it's own may not terribly justify itself, but because they way it connects with other pieces of your operation, the overall flow is better, and therefore justified. It's the difference between an "accountants" way of seeing a business vs systematic thinking. Much important to think about how the "whole" than the parts.
Figma isn’t very good. It’s better than sketch for prototyping, but not as good for vector. It’s also web based, so it’s painfully slow. I also think it’s a bit expensive.
> Gsuite
Google is an evil company, but it’s a choice between giving an evil company money, or using a terrible product (O365). I have to focus on the business, not wondering why Outlook isn’t filtering Spam. So Gsuite it is.
> Gusto
Gusto is fine really. I contemplated putting this one in the Happily category, but ultimately decided to move it down given that I do think it’s a bit expensive for what you get.
> Stripe
Stripe’s core payment processing is obviously the best around. Where I have issue with Stripe is in the fees they charge (pretty high), and their new Customer Billing Portal. It’s a half baked product that doesn’t support even slightly complex billing mechanisms.
> Netlify
Netfliy is a good product, and I enjoy using it, but their pricing is strange. I can host 10 sites for free but it’s $15 per user for a collaborator? Seems weird. I’d happily pay say $30/m for unlimited users.
The only reason I have Microsoft 365 is Excel. Everything else I can live with GSuite. I also like to have my software and data on my local drive if I want. If Excel isn't needed, GSuite it is!
I have a small team (3 people) and we often don’t work the same hours, so it’s nice to hop on Slack and read about what my other colleagues are working on and how I might be able to help.
It’s also a great way to eliminate daily standups. I despise pointless meetings, so anything we can do over async text the better.
Linear founder here. As you pointed out issue tracking and project management tools can get easily out of control if concepts get overcomplicated etc. I can't really say of the other tools but we tried to build Linear to be simple and really fast, and adopt to your needs as your grow (e.g. enable more advanced features as you need them).
Linear is free to use for a modest issue count so it's pretty low key to try it out for a project with your team if you want to compare it. And if you end up switching, we have open source import scripts available: https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import If you end up trying us out and need help organizing your team, feel free to contact me jori@linear.app
I use linear extensively. It’s the best tool for managing development tasks imo. Takes the best features of JIRA without the horrible UI/UX (linear has workflows, boards, lists, assignments, tags, cycles, projects, etc).
It’s also just incredibly simple to start using. They have a free version, so I’d say it’s worth checking out. It has integration with GitHub and Slack, which is about all I need as far as integrating goes.
I’ve used both Monday and Asana. I’ve not used Zenhub. Comparing linear to Monday and Asana, I’d say linear is much faster. It’s a native Mac app. It’s also nicer looking than both imo, which is a big deal for me.
I use Linear and have previously used Asana and Jira. Linear is much, much better. It's much faster, the design is better (easier to understand what i'm looking at, switch between board and list views), and doesn't have infinite complexity. You can create tasks, and subtasks, and projects, and that's it. There are Cycles (sprints) with some neat scheduling tools for it, that may not be useful for you if you don't work that way -- our team does so it's very nice. I'd recommend giving it a shot, I think once you actually use the application for about 5 minutes you'll understand if it's worth it or not.
Using Linear on an 8 person team. Refugees from JIRA in the corporate world. Absolutely love it - keeps us on track across time zones.
The one piece that's probably missing is a tie in to broader "roadmapping" software - I know what's coming in the next 3 sprints, but we haven't found a way to intuitively tie this to our 12-month roadmap - well automatically anyway.
I’ve used Asana in the past. Compared to Linear, it’s absolutely terrible. It’s super slow, has inconsistent UX, and barely supports keyboard shortcuts.
Linear supports keyboard shortcuts for literally everything, is blazing fast, and looks nice. It’s one of the few web apps that I actually enjoying using.
Just to toss another hat in the ring - people who are interested in a tool that has a lot of same performance/hotkey characteristics as Linear but takes a different approach to what a product management tool/issue tracker should be should take a look at Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. We've also got great integrations to Github, Slack, Figma, etc. We've got a pretty generous free tier so you can try it out for quite a while with your team before you need to pay.
While I think it's great you're thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month you're spending right now!
I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method.
I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!
That's not the whole list. We spend around $500/month if we include everything.
We used to host our own stuff to spend less, like having our own Mailtrain instance instead of paying for an email marketing solution.
But if you do too much of that, you'll find yourself spending a lot of your time doing sys admin stuff, instead of working on your product. This can kill you, especially at an early stage.
As we scale our[1] revenues (currently at $5k MRR), that $500/m cost will become a lower and lower percentage and be almost negligible.
Maybe it's worth waiting until you've scaled your revenue before committing to those outgoings? As someone else mentionrd, 10% of that is for scheduling meetings, with a team of 3!
If you have a lot of meetings with external parties (it's not about scheduling between the 3 internal) a good calendar scheduling tool is worth it in my opinion. When I was a sales engineer at a software startup we probably spent 10-15 minutes per lead sorting calendar times out. Considering only 1 in 10 leads turn into sales this was 2.5-3 hours per converted lead.
By having a self service scheduling tool we already filter for the non serious people "I'm not wasting my time finding time in your calendar" and improve our lead quality while reducing the back and forth nonsense that no one enjoys.
Might be offtopic but adding friction might seem like a good time balancing matrix but what you are doing is filtering not the worst leads but probably the easiest ones to convert. Those willing to go back and forth on time will build muscle memory and make a deal easier. The others are still cold.. they will take additional effort during the sales calls.
You may also need to hire more people as you scale. With API-based billing, this is fine as you can still allocate a certain expected revenue per user as a cost.
With head-based billing, what used to be a fixed cost now grows linearly, yearly, with headcount.
Why add holidays and sick leave to an individual employee's costs? Most white collar employees would have an annual salary this is factored into already, unless you're having to hire temporary replacements for them perhaps (which would be more than a 15% cost, I suspect).
You are right, I usually do this to get to a worked daily or worked hourly cost (I work in consultancy) so I take holidays & sick into account to understand cost per worked hour / cost per worked day.
In reality it depends on the type of work you are doing.
Actually there is a more important comparison than salary: what benefit accrues to the company for 1 employee month.
When a company is undergoing fast growth, the return from one month of work can be startlingly huge. Every tool that enables better use of time is a multiplier on the income generated by that employee.
Also note, “sir” seems snarky to me at best and insulting at worst. Are you even answering a guy?
15k could be cost to the company, which also looks at employment taxes, office space, health insurance, benefits, hr/support overhead, interviewing, training and managing. A new developer earning 8k/mo easily costs the company 15k/mo.
The person at ~15k/month (which is a really good salary) wouldn't only be doing that. I maintain a lot of tools that would cost 1000x if we paid subscriptions per user @ SaaS and it probably takes me 1-2 days per month. We're at ~150 devs.
I do a lot of other work in the other days of the month including coding, automation, leading, etc. etc.
The problem comes when services start effectively 10x'ing or 100x'ing prices, like what postman did at the beginning of this year (bumping up the price for each tier and dramatically reducing what you get)
That $200/mo today could easily be $200K/mo a few years from now, and at that point it will be harder to switch off.
If ~$200/month materially effects your runway, what you're saying is true, but even super duper early stage bootstrapped startups have that kind of cash, in my (admittedly limited) experience.
And it's not like you don't need what these services are providing, you'd just then have to do it yourself, and honestly I'm finding time to be more valuable than money right this very moment in the startup I'm working at...
~$200/month for a 3 person startup might seem high. now calculate the cost of a server to host that FOSS stuff and the time and energy to maintain it, backups, etc.
TBH i would rather put that time and energy in my startup instead of maintaining a FOSS stack for my company.
Do you think FOSS stacks are made of ice? That they would melt if you don't constantly resupply fresh ice from arctic excursions.
Surely you maintain your start-up tech on F/OSS, as most of the internet does, so just use the person who types 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' on your service to do the same on your local VM.
Or leave keep it local and literally never update it.
> BUT a team of 3 at early stage project/startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200/month
I think this is backwards. Instead the relevant question is how much can a team of three (x) achieve by aggressively outsourcing everything that isn't their expertise/value add
Even if you presume the FOSS versions were functionally equivalent, there is large cost to rolling your own (admin, backups, debugging). It’s precisely the 3 person teams where SaaS makes most sense. Larger orgs can amortize the relatively fixed cost over a larger user base.
How much time will you spend writing custom solutions? Why would you focus on anything other than your core businesses? Why would you want to maintain servers and OSS that has nothing to do with your core businesses? I don't think doing everything yourself just to save $200/month always pays off.
I know your point of view is the accepted mainstream view, but I disagree and I never did it in 15 years.
Maintaining a gitlab instance, a mattermost instance, a kubernetes instance, an elk instance on a cheap VPS provider gets you in a pretty good place for very little money.
Your internal tools won't need much attention until you hit a higher number of employees.
Also with three employees you can still get away with a lot of free stuff (eg. a discord or matrix server for chatting, private GitHub repos)
Because your tech solution is not NOT YOUR business - its one aspect of it, and customized solution may instead of cloud one give you higher efficiency as it is tailored specifically to your needs, plus durability as you totally control it. Cost is totally not important in that regard.
Cost of cloud solution is not comparable to cost of employee - employees build what you want, while on cloud you adapt to the solutions offered and also have to do additional cloud-related duties not relevant to your problem scope (so you payed also for the stuff you don't need).
$200/mo across the time is like the cost of one developer laptop accidentally left under the dripping faucet of a hotel sink in Las Vegas. I know this stuff can add up and people should be careful about racking up recurring charges for stuff they're not really using or getting much value out of, but optimizing away $200/mo doesn't seem like a huge ROI.
If you're paying people on your team, the most expensive thing you probably buy is a person/hour of time.
Honestly, I am less concerned with the money and more concerned with the level of process overhead. This article makes it sound like they are spending a lot of time in email, notes, meeting minutes, etc. Which seems like an awful lot for 3 people who can just talk to each other. I feel like todo.txt is enough organization for three people.
> I've written on HN before that I'm TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason!
This is my complaint too, especially when a "user" is defined in a ridiculous way. GitLab is a good example. Unless you're on the top tier plan, guests are considered users, so if you want to give someone access to a pages site that has authentication, you have to pay as if they're a developer. It's frustrating.
> You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source
> software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM
> and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN
> DATA!!!
I'd love to run some open-source stuff for analytics or error tracking or application monitoring. And we have, in the past. And they work pretty well. When they work.
If the VM disk starts filling up because log rotation wasn't set up right, or the ElasticSearch instance we only run for this service starts flapping, now I've gotta pay one of my devs to work on that instead of work on our product. And in your example, where I've only got three folks, that interruption could be ruinous.
$200/mo ($2,400/yr) is nothing compared to the financial and opportunity costs here.
I think this is probably a good reason. It probably really helps to see the billing, user management, support handling, emails, etc. from these other Saas products.
There's appears to be a mismatch between their costs and their billing, which either is true and someone will take advantage eventually which will force a restructuring of billing, or it's not actually a mismatch and we're all judging a situation with not enough information.
It is, but it’s funny no one complains about per-user billing for the other products. All of these other products bill per user instead of by bandwidth and storage.
Depends on what apps you are already using and if there's a self-hosted alternative to it.
For analytics for example you can save a lot of money without sacrificing insights or privacy by using self-hosted userTrack[0] instead of GA + Hotjar/FullStory for example.
Overruse of subscriptions is like creating unnecessary dependencies. Eventually this transitions to a state that is incompatible with qualities such as small, fast, portable.
1) Any SaaS that actually provides values is probably worth 10-100x what it costs.
Of course, it doesn't mean they all provide value.
There's a mistake in your comment ('we stopped using them and didn't miss them') which is the assumption that SaaS doesn't provide value, which is obviously not the case.
Good tech is an amplifier - that's why it exists.
You're telling the farmer don't spend money on fancy tractors, toil the land with a sickle.
For every $ you spend, the idea is that you are generating ROI, ergo, you want to spend more.
If this 4-person team is hauling in $400K/year it's precisely because of those tools, without which they literally might not be able to do it.
So the advice there should be:
"Don't use the things that don't help, definitely use the things that do"
2) The mindset of 'FOSS is Free' is completely wrong.
Every tech has a 'total cost of ownership' and if you have to spend any time at all installing, fussing with, maintaining it - it's probably worth paying for a SaaS.
$5/month is literally 5 minutes of an employees time.
Think about that: if the SaaS saves you 5 minutes - it's worth it - OR - if the FOSS takes more than 5 minutes a month in over head, it's not worth it.
One of the many reasons that Windows dominates Linux (it's more complicated obviously) - is that Windows is somewhat easier to use and support out of the box. So if Windows saves a single support issue per year, per user - then it's worth it.
3) Data Ownership - like everything, the pragmatic reality of the situation matters more than ideology.
So many factors: security, integrity of host, does the data have 'long term value' (do you need granular data from 5 years ago?).
Do you really think that your home-baked file server in the corner hosting your shared documents is more secure, supportable, maintainable, lower cost than the SaaS?
Maybe - but probably not.
Summary: invest in things that are materially useful to your operations, and if they do 'help' they are probably worth quite a lot but have the self awareness to not get addicted to 'distracting' SaaS, and make pragmatic decisions about what data will sit in the cloud and why, and finally you can still push vendors to provide more 'controlled' data scenarios, such as co-locating services that they run etc.
My issue is that value based pricing sets up incentives against one of the coolest parts of software and digital goods- near zero marginal costs. Software is kind of magical in that once produced it doesn’t cost much to add a second or billionth user. Of course SaaS has more costs, but not nearly as much as the “charge 5% of value” or whatever.
So I think it’s foolish to not buy tractors and till the land by hand, it’s also foolish to think of a hammer as a value add so that the cost should be 5% of the benefit gained by using it instead of some reasonable profit on top of cost. I’ve bought some plumbing tools decades ago that are really useful, they are well made and should last decades more. Saying that I should pay based on value might make sense but isn’t a good user strategy in the long term.
So that's a fair point ... but 1) 'value based' pricing is inherently part of capitalism, and it's more or less a 'good thing' ... and 2) the upside in general is still pretty huge for most services. The fact that software has 'zero unit cost' is for the most part, built into the price.
It's the reason you can try 100 services for free before buying. The challenge is, to find things that really work for you and that do provide value.
Your summary is totally right. But first part of the comment feels too one-sided (pro-saas). So couple of balancing thoughts for each point.
(1). Tractor analogy seems too extreme - it's about skiping automation in farming. But if one skips saas, one still automates in house (the amplifier is the automation).
Also, frequently "saas" feels less like "tech" and more like "outsourcing".
(2) Total cost of ownership applies to saas as well. Lawyer's time for contract. Developer\architect time to figure out documentation, so company would know what configuration to ask for.
Communication being external also costs time.
(3) Solutions for data ownership exist, but it's one additional thing to worry about.
After reading the comments, whether SaaS is worth it seems to depend on a company's circumstances.
A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that's self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.
Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.
You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.
Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
For Gmail, docs and drive, G Suite is an absolute bargain. The user experience you describe above (committing Libre office files to git? have you used Libre office) makes me shudder.
> My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".
Definitely! when I was first consulting I created all my invoices in OpenOffice doc files, and then emailed them out. I kept track of everything I'd sent out to clients on a spreadsheet. It was worth it because it was free. I didn't have many clients and was just starting out. Wanted to keep my expenses down.
However, after a few years I used FreshBooks, which automatically built an invoice for me. I could run reports easily. I could send the invoice. I could even accept payment via credit card.
It cost me something (I don't remember what it was, but it was under $50/month) and saved me so much time. (There are many competitors to FreshBooks and I'm sure each of them would have done the same.)
That's the tradeoff. Most things can be done for "free" if you count your time as having zero value. That is very rarely the case. It may be a good idea to minimize $$ out the door as much as possible when you are starting, but in a while (even if it takes you years, like it did for me) you'll learn to trade money for time using specialized tools.
Most importantly it gets you SSO on basic plans for any SaaS. Big companies using Okta or something have to pay for all those Enterprise plans just for that.
Yep, saves a lot of annoyance having to keep track of a bunch of logins across SaaSs especially when you need to revoke access when someone leaves, so instead of having to go to all the various services individually to deactivate the accounts, you can just deactivate their Google account or revoke its access to those services.
Ahh, that is a nice and unexpected bonus. Does “Sign in with Google” allow provisioning of new accounts with appropriate permissions for a service/SaaS by an admin? (I’ve only used OneLogin/Okta)
I'm not sure what level of permissions is available with "sign in with google". In my experience, that is handleded within the SaaS. Here's what's happened (at least in the companies I've worked in, which tend to be a bit smaller).
1. New employee hired
2. They get a gsuite account. This gives them access to google drive, gmail, gcal, etc. (This is the provisioning I think you are referring to.)
3. They can now login to asana, zapier, <other saas tool> with their gsuite account, using "login with google"
4. Their permissions within these saas tools are managed by the admins in those tools (not from gsuite).
5. When an employee departs, you disable their gsuite account. Then they can't log in to any of the SaaS tools, since their google account is disabled.
If you want a user to have centralized RBAC or ABAC, you need to use a real IdP, not gsuite in the way I outline above.
If you are using SAML for gsuite, you can use SCIM, I believe, to provision, but that's a different flow than I have outlined above. https://support.google.com/a/topic/6400789 has more on that.
I don't think it is equivalent, because the Infamous Dropbox Comment is about the behaviour of non-technical consumers. There's a pretty vast chasm between a non-technical consumer trying to set up rsync and a software developer adding a Trello <-> GitHub integration.
It does seem frivolous to me to pay money to automatically close tasks when a linked pull request is merged.
And paying $720 annually to host some frontends? Depending on what they mean by "frontend", this might actually be exactly $720 more than they ought to be spending on this.
It's very equivalent. Developers have a hard on for saying "I don't need to pay $5/mo for this when I can just build it in a weekend myself" Then they half ass something that took them probably a month of fiddling to make happen, then they're so vested in this idea that their homegrown bastardization is superior that they spend more time justifying the insane loopholes and workarounds to make it somewhat usable...
It doesn't take "a month of fiddling" to add an integration like this. It's already readily available[0] and has been for half a decade. It's also $24 per month — not $5 — at their current scale. These aren't amounts to be sniffed at either. The $720 a year they're paying for "frontend hosting" is not far off what I pay my accountant.
> Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board,
> discussions ci/actions to trigger other stuff [...],
> storage of docs, revision control, tagging and
> organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting,
> support tickets
All of these features either work only for devs, or are extremely bare-bones.
Would I love it if my entire company could live in Github? Sure! But fully half the company is composed of folks who will never, ever log in to GitHub.
And don't get me started on issues. For personal stuff I'm GH all the way, but for planning a year's worth of development? It just doesn't fly. I'm looking at Linear now because I dislike JIRA's UX, and GitHub/GitLab both are too lightweight for my needs.
As someone who is beginning to live in financial spreadsheets, I'm damn well happy to pay for SaaS that totals less than a FTE dev and also allows my entire company to move faster as a result. Like, not even a question.
Your comment seems to echo a fairly common refrain in this submission, that a startup should be miserly with their cash.
What's the disconnect, I wonder? Why is there this belief that an early stage startup should pinch pennies? Am I missing something?
For me, time (to spend building and selling) is substantially (like 2-3x or even higher) more valuable than cash at this stage. Am I undervaluing cash?
If you see value and can afford it, sure go for it. The goal of my comment wasn't to dissuade people from spending on SaaS, but rather to inspire others who don't have the luxury of have extra cash to be not discouraged by articles like this.
I assume there's going to be a pretty big difference between bootstrapped and funded startups. Efficiency is nice, but you need some runway too. Even if you move fast, your clients probably aren't and you need to last until the momentum gets going.
On the other hand, it's likely many are going too far, there's no point in being a zombie company for years. If you fail, better fail fast.
$100/mo won't make or break this startup. Inability to move fast might. Money of this scale is not a problem. Remember the insight from The Goal. Optimize at the bottleneck alone.
After all that, why would you spend $5/month/user on Fastmail when there are even cheaper and good options? Fastmail sticks out like a sore thumb in this solution. Mailbox.org and many others provide good email and web solutions.
A bit off topic, does anyone know a guide or a good starting point to build landing page that look that clean and modern. For example the landing page for this website https://savvycal.com/
An alternative to Vercel and more budget friendly is AWS Amplify console. Costs just a few cents per build, connects with GitHub and you have multiple environments. I’ve had a decent experience - though far from perfect, justifies the cost.
MIRO If I ever grow to a large enough org, I will RUN towards paying for a Miro subscription. I will insist on religious level use of it. It is such a game changer.
> Honestly was it your managers and the development pipeline you hated or was Jira really to blame here?
It was Jira specifically. I've worked in very similar environments with and without Jira, and at a place that migrated onto Jira.
> I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead?
Trello for the "who's working on what right now" part, even if that leads to having to copy tasks over from another system. For the bug-tracking part... honestly I was happiest using Bugzilla, though I don't know if that even still exists. For the roadmap part, just something like a wiki page, though admittedly a lot of that just comes down to not breaking down your tasks in too much detail too early on.
the homepage uses server rendered Next.js/React which pushes the boundaries of modern web dev. Not surprising. But I still think it's the future once it's more stable.
This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.
After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16/mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.