Ask HN: Affording Accounting/SaaS for multiple side hustles?
The crux of the matter is that I find some SaaS completely invaluable, like watching session replays (= finding bugs/why people buy), accounting, and recently, using AI to prospect/lead gen (and doing actual content myself, at conferences, via phone). Many times hosting is free on startup plans on cloud, but if you don't create a new company entity, you often cannot access cloud credits for the smaller projects (sensibly), or you are paying OpenAI, so you are looking at $100-$500 for the tech too. I also feel they are kind of unoptional now: Sales response rates are 3-4x lower than what they were in 2011, because of AI prospecting/the gradual train of spam and investors focusing on tech. So you need to counter this with tooling.
The thing is each of these services hit minimum plans these days of say $50-$100 for decent usage. And with 3-4 projects, this means I am paying the majority of my margins to them. I think back to 2011, when I had a short term startup, and with the market being less crowded (and luck), was able to generate revenue without any of this tech. Our only running cost was servers and accounting (which was cheaper). The problem then was always distribution, but now I know how to do that, the problem is actually the fixed costs. Nowadays I feel like if you don't have a good enough UI/quality (i.e. use session replay/pay users for feedback), you just can't get high enough revenue and retention. So I buy service after service for each project (as since 2022, more and more limit to one domain per plan etc or have worse free tiers than they used to), but it feels like I'm no further along than I was in 2011. Yes I have tried to self-host supabase and highlight.io, both were too hard to do for each site. Other software was self-hostable, but not the ones I'm paying for! (without all sorts of config for email auth, etc)
Come to think of it, will we ever see a service like "Once" cover these kind of things? Because SaaS boilerplates sort of solved that issue for me. It's now the "improvement and listening to users" part that I am forking out money for.