Ask HN: What SaaS expenses do you wish you could reduce? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What SaaS expenses do you wish you could reduce?

18 pointsthorwasdfasdf14 comments

What are your biggest SaaS related expenses? which ones do you want to reduce?

1. SEMRush and AHREFS - it sucks having both. They're both amazing but they do very similar things (neither 100% replaces the other). 2. Trello - I hate trello. It's bulky and irritating. I'm slowly migrating to AirTable, which is much better.

tangent

> 2. Trello - I hate trello. It's bulky and irritating

at $LEGACY_IT_ENTERPRISE_DAYJOB we have jira, which has been configured to death with about 100 custom ticket states -- mostly synonyms such as "done", "story done", "closed" ,... -- and 200 custom ticket relationships, i.e. the union of all possible states and relationships every project manager ever wanted on any project in the last 10 years. we are of course required to use this one monolithic jira tarpit to make it easy to centrally govern and audit changes (compliance...)

What does SEMRush do that Ahrefs doesn't? I get along just fine with ahrefs.

I spend ~$1.5k/mo on Heroku (~27% of monthly revenue). I'm using 2–4 (auto scaling) Performance-M dynos because I was tired of sharing resources and having spotty response times (as were my customers). Once I moved from Standard-2X to Performance-M, my response times dropped from ~500ms avg w/ random timeouts to <90ms avg w/ no timeouts, but my costs skyrocketed. I want a managed hosting provider that rivals Heroku but doesn't make me feel like I have to pay an arm and a leg to get decent service. I don't want to, nor do I have the time to, move to and manage infra on AWS yet.

why not just run DO droplets at $5/pop?

> I want a managed hosting provider that rivals Heroku but doesn't make me feel like I have to pay an arm and a leg to get decent service.

I highly recommend scalingo.com - it’s actually a better product (imo) and costs about half as much.

I just moved from Heroku to Dokku[1] on DigitalOcean w/ my site[2] and it's great. Dokku is basically set up to run in more or less the same way as Heroku except in a container on another platform. There's an one-click install image that you can use to set it up on a DigitalOcean droplet. It took me about 3 hours to move over and set it up, but that's mostly because I screwed up my DNS and nginx configs, otherwise it would have taken 30 minutes. Not sure how it would affect performance compared to Heroku, but I'm fairly sure it would save a lot of money for not too much effort. Perhaps not quite what you're looking for in every way, but you could definitely slash that bill without having to spend loads of time managing the server.

[1] - http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/ [2] - http://sourcesort.com

p.s. just in case you did YC Startup School, you can use the deals to get $10k in infrastructure credits from DigitalOcean until Nov 1

Heroku. Used to be paying around 1,500 month, but with some major surgery got it down to ~$750. You can't really go any lower without becoming a "hobby" app.

Splunk. We spend so much there and we want to process even more data with it. I could retire in short order on the amount of money we spend on them.

Not really saas but lots of people want to reduce their AWS bills

DataDog

Intercom

Check this: https://intercom.rocks/ (save money on your monthly Intercom bill with automated contact archiving)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com