SaaS We Happily Pay For
francescodilorenzo.com
francescodilorenzo.com
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.
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.
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?
If stripe bans you from buying your own service, they may want to rethink that policy.
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.
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).
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).
Noob question: Would using a debit card test the payment system without the self loan float?
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.
After, the roadmap is open, but we will probably start working on analytics before new integrations.
Cool functionality, which my enterprise company would use it.
iOS 14.2
Also happens if you open it slowly, but you have to zoom in quite a bit.
The inner image is just an image but there is a component around that. I am not a front end person and don’t have a theory but I’m also curious now.
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.
That would be a good reason to pay well for a nice product imo.
"Netflix is $10/m, so why would I buy Mailbrew (the product we make) for the same price?"
Apparently hundreds of people are happy to pay for quality indie software that solves their problems. We are among them.
No, that's not the argument being made though.
The argument is 'why is a team of 3 paying 3x$10 to 'schedule meetings'. There's only 3 people, i.e. a reasonable questioning of the value being made.
Honestly, $10 is not that much, but why on earth would it be needed is a fair question.
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.
100/h is noce. It is so much nocer if it is going for a year, decade.
If you are worth $100/h but are not getting paid - that is you have cash flow problems, then these are a lot of SaaS to be paying for.
That is a oversimplification but it is (almost) all about cash flow in a small business just getting going
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.
Time is a flow not a stock. It is only worth what you get paid for it.
How does this even matter from a budget perspective? You are already paying probably in the $10-20k / month range for per-employee salary.
Seems a lot like complaining about a dripping faucet while you have a water main break.
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.
- CloudFlare
- Roam
- Slack
- Linear
- Geekbot
SaaS I’m okay with paying for:
- Figma
- Gsuite
- Gusto
- Stripe
- Netlify
SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice:
- AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits)
- Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do)
- Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)
It’s also a great way to eliminate daily standups. I despise pointless meetings, so anything we can do over async text the better.
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.
We’re using Zenhub now and it’s slow and misused in our org (one giant project board instead of separate boards per repo / project).
Curious if anyone here is / has used linear and could compare their experience with it to Monday, Asana or Zenhub?
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.
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
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.
https://linear.app/YOUR_ORG/settings/roadmapI 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!!!
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.
[1]: https://mailbrew.com
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.
TBH i would rather put that time and energy in my startup instead of maintaining a FOSS stack for my company.
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.
It wont melt.
Yes, if you care about things like not getting oWn3d and having your customer data exposed.
The mouth salivates at this prospect.
Yes, please set up your Jenkins server once and never look at it again...
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.
Statutory allowances in the UK are higher than in the US, and in the UK for instance you would add:
- 12.5% national insurance + apprentice levy
- 3-4% pension
- 10% of days as holidays
- 5% of days as sick / other leave (dependent on amount taken in reality)
- 2% payroll fees / other
Note, this excludes training and equipment/office space.
In reality it depends on the type of work you are doing.
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?
I do a lot of other work in the other days of the month including coding, automation, leading, etc. etc.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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...
If you're paying people on your team, the most expensive thing you probably buy is a person/hour of time.
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
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.
> 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!!!
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.
It helps me focus on being productive and not trying to be a hosting provider to myself.
I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup
Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place
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.
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.
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.
> Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".
Is that because most SaaS offers "sign in with google"? Or is there something else involved?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.
So instead you should spend valuable engineering time designing, building, and maintaining your own collaboration tools?
> 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
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.
Time, energy, attention, creative limit is important for a tiny startups like this.
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 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.
[0]: https://blog.trello.com/github-and-trello-integrate-your-com...
Use whatever tool to create the product you want to create.
- hacker/cracker culture
It was a bit confusing getting all the per branch/commit deployments behind a password so that added another 10 minutes...
Very pleased with it.
I tried Linear, the interface is bit too bland to my taste. I am going to give it another try since there are so many good words about it in comments.
I'd take a pay cut to never have to use JIRA again.
I will assume you've experienced it used in large projects / environments. What do you prefer/recommend instead?
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.
But I'm biases as a Vue/frontend dev
I cant help but wonder why not just send an email.