SaaS tools that get things done for tech startups | Hacker News Reader

SaaS tools that get things done for tech startups

juicefs.com

103 pointsmountainview59 comments

I'm not a dev, so some of the dev specific tools I can't speak to, but after looking through this list, for biz admin I suggest looking at Zoho One -- it literally has 90 percent of the tools already and they're integrated, for one price per user. It's been incredible for me as a freelancer to have one place and one price for all my needs: docs, mail, social, email campaigns, transactional email, website, crm, invoicing, books, appointments, webinars, meetings, project management, helpdesk, ecommerce etc... It's a pretty robust platform (and for a one-person operation it's less than $500 a year)

I don't work for them, I'm just a fan.

My roots are in engineering, and I agree wholeheartedly: zoho one is a no-brainer compared to having to cobble together solutions for standard business functions from a dozen vendors at triple the aggregate cost. Just the savings vs QBO or Xero makes it worthwhile.

Which tools?

I use these: contracts / signatures, docs, e-mail, social, email campaigns, transactional email, website, crm, invoicing, books, appointments, webinars, meetings, project management, helpdesk, ecommerce.

But there are way waaaay more apps included: https://www.zoho.com/one/applications/web.html

And project has Gantt charts (I clicked your link just to check that). I have always been disappointed by project/ticket apps that pretend to do project management but don't have a gantt view of tasks.

I feel like the promise of Zoho One is strong, but when I was using it I found myself frequently frustrated with the way that most of the services seemed to range from slightly-to-dramatically worse than the competition. As soon as you start paying for a couple of alternatives because the Zoho versions are bad, the one-price-for-everything proposition becomes less appealing.

If you had to criticize Zoho One, what would you say?

Hi, I'm the author of this post. We prefer to choose tools for a function by daily users than choose an all-in-one suite. One reason is our team is small, so this way is affordable, also we trust the best tool for a function is 10x better than the one of the all-in-one suite. Second, integrating those tools is not a hard thing.

I love seeing pragmatic posts like this. Of course YMMV and people have different tastes in tools so take what you like and leave the rest. It’s fun to see what others are doing and how they’re thinking about stuff.

Travis CI and Solarwinds on the list eh...

Hard agree. I really don't think TravisCI is very good or reliable.

Yeah, basically came to say this. While I appreciate the effort, I think this list is way off.

I'm a daily user of Papertrail. It's starting to grow too expensive for our team ($100/16 GB). Still I haven't found an alternative with instant text search and infinite scroll. The ability to quickly scroll through the logs has proven to be crucial to debugging critical problems. I'm having a hard time filtering through JSON logs in Grafana/Elastic search/cloud-native log engine.

They mentioned GH actions also. So maybe they switched?

As far as the Get Things Done aspect goes, I'd happy replace Github + Github Actions + Travis/other CI/CD tools with Gitlab. It really does all that, and the CI/CD tool is >>> Github Actions.

Could you explain more on that thought?

Sure! As far as normal DVCS features go, I'd say Gitlab and Github are almost at feature parity(I happen to use both extensively). The UI may just come down to a matter of preference.

Github indeed has somewhat superior code-review tools. But I've found Gitlab to be perfectly adequate.

When it comes to CI/CD, Gitlab CI blows Github Actions out of the water by a HUGE margin.

So, if I just wanted a tool that got things done for me, instead of fragmenting myself with Github + Github Actions + TravisCI / CircleCI, etc, I'd just get one Gitlab subscription and call it a day.

Totally agree, and their free tier (unless it's changed in the last 2 years) is frankly amazing. We ran a start-up entirely in the free tier with our own hosted runners which are also amazing. (Required a bit of hacking but we had scale-to-zero fleet of ARM and x86 runners in AWS with the necessary rights to do whatever, right up to deploys into DEV, packer builds etc)

They started in 2017 when I think Travis was still a viable option, especially for those that already knew how to use it.

I'd go for Grafana Cloud over Papertrail.

The $7/month papertrail account seems to be just 1 GB/month of logs which is pretty trivial. With grafana you get 50 GB/month plus everything else.

Papertrail used to be awesome, until the SW acquisition. I've been very happy with LogDNA/Mezmo as a replacement (no affiliation, just a happy customer!).

Been using logdna for a while now and only wished I started using it sooner. My only complaint is lack of mobile ux/ui

Could you expand on why it’s no longer awesome? I’ve only used papertrail in Heroku, until recently on a new project. It seems the same as before, but I’m haven’t needed to use it heavily yet.

I'd recommend HelpScout instead of Intercom for standard customer support. It's affordable (pricing per agent) and very high quality software without any bullshit. Intercom might have additional features, but it's also very expensive.

expensify -> brex

sendgrid -> mailgun

travis -> probably anything else

As someone who moved from Mandrill to Sendgrid, and not exactly satisfied...can you tell me what Mailgun does better?

Deliverability is not one of its strengh. Considering a change right now.

Deliverability is not a strength of...which one? Postmark or Sendgrid?

Skip Mailgun and go straight to Postmark. Phenomenal delivery rates.

They were recently acquired by ActiveCampaign though so hopefully things don't change.

I actually misremembered and meant postmark.

> expensify -> brex

Brex is a shitty company that doesn't want your business[1] unless you're a VC money pit.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/brex-drops-small-business-cu...

ramp is an alternative. cards over reimbursement or purchase requests is a game changer for small teams though

With all these fees, how tf do you make any profit?

As someone who operates a small tech company (<5 employees), I can't relate to using all these products. However, our needs are different than the author's. Given that they're paying $800+ USD/month, I suspect their monthly revenue and the time saved from these tools justifies their cost.

As soon as your company can afford to hire a single full-time employee, most of these fees seem pretty inconsequential. And if you haven't hired any employees, you're probably in bootstrapping mode, so you're betting on becoming profitable before running out of runway.

If spending like a hundred dollars per month per employee on productivity tools is sinking your business then you have much bigger problems.

Nice sharing! One question, how could 10G tier for solarwinds-papertrail is enough for you? I am expecting you to have more logs generated, it's due to only short-term data being queried in it(cold ones will be archived in different infra?) or?

Only core critical logs are saved in solarwinds-papertrail, it's easy to search. Others are saved in #JuiceFS. Eat our own dog food

Good list. It's a little surprising that Google still can't bundle a better chat application in Google Workspace.

Really? I use Google Chat all the time in Workspace. I admit that my needs are pretty undemanding but it does what I want.

I think it is do with company culture. It is an email and docs heavy culture so a lot of collaboration happens on that.

If they were chat heavy like most other organisations seem to be, they would put more effort into building features that others seem to want.

I wonder if people actually do work other than "using" these products all day.

Surprised to see Travis CI on that list. Intercom also gets fairly expensive.

There is nothing about security - a goto platform of sorts.

The article says they value convenience over security.

So they value profit over their customers

There are individual cases where this is the right move. E.g. your main business is consulting services, and you choose a quick-and-dirty service to host a marketing website with no form input and no production content. Convenience of, say, WordPress might trump a static site generator.

What are you looking for with regards to security?

Could use Asana

Or Linear. The only project management tool I enjoy using as a developer.

> we favor cloud-based applications over those that are privately deployed or homegrown open-source products

no, thanks

Up front: I agree with your “no, thanks”, but, I do think there is a philosophical point the author has to not host software themselves, which 86’s most OSS.

Not that I agree with their “rules”, but I can at least understand why they’d choose to not host.

(Fair warning: I host other peoples software (Heroku architect) for a living so I’m probably very biased)

many open-source vendors offer hosted options or link consultancies who will host on your behalf

The older I get, the more I've slid towards the opinion that I'd much rather configure cloud SaaS via terraform than waste days of work maintaining a self-hosted application.

Yea reading HN comments gives me the impression most of the readership has never had to manage anything of complexity beyond their "homelab".

When I was younger I thought it is cool to be admin and have access to stuff, run things on my own being like Neo in Matrix.

Then I had admin access to wi-fi router in dorm, it stopped being funny when people shitty laptops could not connect and they would blame you or for any kind of connection issue for that matter :)

Then I had a job with support duty, 1 A.M. calls because you need to check logs are not cool.

Now I don't want to have any privileges unless I really cannot do my work. If I don't have to run some application and someone else is getting called for outage or I can say that is our provider can't do much - I am definitely making company I work for - pay to another company and stay out of equation.

If I run some software for myself by myself I am not going to pay for that - but as soon as other people are involved I would tell them to go and buy that service. If it is work related even more so.

Yep. Again, the nuance of this point is lost on the "homelab" crowd, but if you're in a software business, your software is what your business is.

Not running a monitoring platform, not running a logging system, not building your own PaaS. Outsource this as much as possible to 3rd-party agents with a sizable economy of scale.

Nearly all engineering teams(outside of FAANG) simply aren't resourced to re-invent the wheel over and over, especially when it means providing after-hours support for the wheel as well.

Agree to a point. I'd say that "nearly all" teams outside those in medium to large companies aren't resourced enough to maintain existing well-packaged wheels. It's a gradient, not a binary. If you've got someone who's capable of deploying EKS and setting up a CI/CD that lets developers move quickly, it mightn't be a big deal for them to deploy the Grafana stack (loki, mirmir, grafana) and have logs and metrics on the cheap. Log/metric/APM services can get ludicrously expensive and unless you're in fintech, you might only need them for debugging and capacity planning.

me too

but for me the SaaS offering has to be either:

a) based on open-source

b) interoperable (S3, MQTT)

otherwise prepare to be screwed over by greedy corporates

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