Show HN: Stop wasting money on Saas services you don't use | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stop wasting money on Saas services you don't use

saasly.com

76 pointsyakshaving36 comments

I think it could be useful, however I just caught myself summing it up to the guy sitting next to me as "a web service for people who subscribe to too many web services"

I'm a little surprised about the praise this is getting here.

"First world problem" seems like an understatement. More like "Silicon Valley problem"...

Well, the one thing Silicon Valley does best is solve its own problems :)

Hah! Very true. Very inward looking right now. What's the world coming to when the ROI touted on the homepage is "I saved $45 a month!" Well, that sounds too snarky. I'm sure this will be valuable to a lot of folks.

Simple honest answer, its a beachhead. Techies are natural early adopters so it makes sense to start small with them. Trust me, our ambitions are far greater :)

Eventually you'll get to "Hey! Are you sure you still need Netflix? You haven't used it in weeks!" =)

You're surprised that a place which skews heavily toward Valley folks, and almost exclusively to first-worlders, is full of support for something that solves their problems?

Honestly, this is great idea. But I'm not going to forward all my bills to some random service. If it somehow worked automatically (ridiculous, I know), I'd absolutely use it.

I just don't want all the overhead.

Yep, inbox mining (via gmail oauth) is our first dev priority. I agree it's gotta be automatic for it really to be useful. Thanks for the feedback!

Alternatively, perhaps you could set up mailboxes for each user that can be entered as the billing address on the individual services.

eg: On my Freshbooks/Chartbeat/Less Accounting/whatever dashboard, I put in "gareth+somerandomkey@saasly.com" as the billing address, then all mails from that service go directly to you - you may even be able to attempt to parse arbitrary services, looking for a "Total: $n.nn" type string in the e-mail, or set up per-service parsing.

Perhaps you could get the data from mint as well? It seems like they had a way to export CSV.

If you're wondering about the process, look at this link. http://saasly.com/confirmation

Not sure why you wouldn't want to put that front and centre (instead of making me enter my email first).

Thank you. I definitely shouldn't have to work to find out what this service actually does, and there's no way I'm giving my email (even to someone who says they won't spam me) until I have an idea how the thing works.

Yeah, good call. We figured we didnt want to confuse users on the "how" while we were trying to pitch them on the "what".

We'll add a "how do we work" link that brings up this information directly on the landing page.

I wish there were a way to use useful services like this without granting permission to read all of my email.

Agreed. That's one reason why we added the email forward (so you just have to forward the specific bills). But it's a bit manual (though you only ever have to forward once, we calculate the monthly date for all the other bills for each service).

Also, we got a great suggestion from someone else about setting up inboxes for everyone so you can just sign up with services with [yourname]@saasly.com and then we just look at your bills instead of all your email.

rescuetime could probably do something like this...

The idea is pretty neat--I recently got the reminder that my AWS free trial was expiring soon, which trigger a "holy crap!" moment because I had completely forgot I was even running an instance there.

That said, seriously guys what is it with ending everything in -ly? It doesn't even really make sense... "in a manner resembling SaaS"? And you're saasly.com, not even saas.ly. SaaSmon, SaaSwatch, these sort of indicate what you're doing, at least, and are reasonably pronounceable too.

Would Sassly ever tell me I'm paying to much for Sassly or is that too meta?

Thanks, it's a great idea I'll be leveraging soon! :)

We're free, forever.

You might want to look into inline installation for the chrome extension:

https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/docs/inline_i...

Thanks! That's great feedback :-)

Personally, if this service could tell me of all the sass software that I am using, that alone would be tremendously useful.

Recently, just for testing, I subscribed to multiple tools to measure site's performance, SEO, to help me navigate all the social media chatter, to help me alleviate emails ...etc.

The only ones I remember are SEOMoz and 37Signals product, because they charge a lot of money and that's kind of memorable. Everything that charges under 20 bucks is below radar until it accumulates.

If this tool could simply extract this bill information and remind me to unsubscribe in time, it would certainly be helpful!

Then once they mine your inbox / bank statements they can get referral bonuses for legitimately churning you to alternate energy / insurance / telco subscriptions etc.

People will hand over all kinds of data to save money.

(Not being snarky, I suspect there is a bigger business model for this)

Congrats on executing a cool service. I wouldn't say we are a direct competitor (mergepay.com), since we are focusing on tracking for businesses and eventually income/expense tracking. Seems like there is definitely a need for this kind of thing.

Awesome idea and only gonna be better with the mail mining. Once you get some traction should be easy to sell targeted ads and mine your own data and sell as market research. Is a Firefox add-on coming soon for the non-Chrome folks?

Thanks -- Yeah, the service coud definitely be a lot more useful once we're capable of mail mining. When we get traction, we'll be able to sell more specific ads and capture some basic, anonymized data about usage.

Before signing up, it'd be great to know what services you "support."

What a fantastic judo move service. Almost feels counter-cultural.

I suddenly have this image of a programmer working while seated in one of those carnival dunk tanks. With a clock ticking away....

And then I suddenly had this image of very upset developers soaked in the tank with thousands of dollars worth of laptops and other hardware ruined.

Great tool for individuals AND could be seriously useful to businesses tracking team usage across several services. Very cool.

How much for your customer list? A list of impulse subscribing customers has got to be worth something...

This is awesome .. have been waiting for this.

I have been waiting for this type of product

This is a fantastic idea. I could see myself using this thing as a consumer too (ie not just for hacker stuff). May have much broader appeal than something just for hackers. Monetization should be fairly straightforward... You know what apps people have, sell very targeted ads for new stuff, sort of like a mint. Seems like a potential gold mine once you get to scale.

You should build something that searches through my gmail for common bills though, I don't want to go through the process of sending you all my bills

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