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Comment by sly010 | Hacker News Reader

This info is actually very useful for me as it confirms my (rational) fear of accumulating expenses. It's way too easy to just spend $10-$50 here and there and before you know it you are spending $1000 a month, while the core service is still running on a single triad of web-server/worker-server/database-server combo with no redundancy.

On the other hand it probably contains everything I could think of and it's still only ~$1000 a month, which is not a lot if you work as freelancer and run your SaaS on the side.

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Spot on. It's also tougher with individual users where $10-$15/mo is the norm. B2B services have it good.

I literally use none of any such paid services. Zero. It's really not that hard. Just automate what can be automated.

Automation isn't just a choice where you snap your fingers and it's done. Automation takes time and effort and adds technical debt and support burden; sometimes these are trivial amounts, sometimes they aren't.

I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python.

I know I could spend maybe two hours writing a replacement for it and set it on an EC2 host and probably never worry about it again, but those two hours are still non-trivial amounts of time: two hours of my time pays for more than three years of that $10/month. Plus, the API may be brittle, there may be edge cases I haven't thought about, and I don't want to add yet another thing to monitor and worry about.

Sometimes, yeah, you can automate things and roll your own dependencies -- and sometimes the calculus works out and it's a no-brainer. But I've found that homebrewing a $XX/mo dependency is rarely the best use of my engineering time.

These are actually solid life advice for programmers: https://xkcd.com/1319/ & https://xkcd.com/1205/

> I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python.

Would you mind sharing which service that is?

I run S3stat, and that's a pretty fair description of the service we provide (for that price). It brings in a nice living from small businesses that can perform the basic arithmetic described above.

Specifically I was referring to Briefmetrics:

briefmetrics.com

S3Stat (who another commenter mentioned) is also a great example.

Cost benefits though. $15 a month to save a few days coding is a bargain.

It really depends on what your turnover is, where you make the most money, and what your time is worth (objectively, rather than ideally).

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