Free tools we used to build our startup | Hacker News Reader

Free tools we used to build our startup

blog.shyahi.com

99 pointssdiw52 comments

I've been a Unix admin for a long time, so for me depending on all those external services with unpredictable performance/colocation/reliability sounds risky and complex.

Is it considered that hard and expensive to just run a full backend stack on your own machines, be it on dedicated servers or AWS etc.? I guess it might even be cheaper to have someone do a professional server setup for you instead of having to deal with all those service providers.

It's a set of trade-offs. I could run my own cloud stack and all too but I don't want to deal with it.

I could push to a self-owned git repo, but bitbucket and github have lots of nice tools already built around them. When they have issues with their servers/disks, most of the time I won't know and don't have to do anything.

Now, by all means, have contingency plans. Keep pushing to that self-owned git repo, have back ups and such, but I think people just don't want to worry about things.

I agree. All those external services have to be up for the users get a bad experience.

> Is it considered that hard and expensive to just run a full backend stack on your own machines

Well time is money. Things that are not core to your business like managing email servers are better off outsourced; not because they are hard, but because it frees your time from setting up, managing, securing and monitoring your email servers, and allows you to put it in something that actually matters to what you do.

In a startup world, it's probably expensive in terms of time. At this point, you may or may not have revenue yet. So you want to spend more time dedicated to validating your idea so you can pay the bills or find the next Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc.

I do agree that eventually everything should be self-managed to ensure service is never disrupted. It's critical to ensure that the service is always online for the customer and maintaining that control, in my opinion, is important.

I'm with you. It's best to run your own copies of the software on your own hardware (or VPS). People are depending more and more on services as a software substitute.

Furthermore, a lot of these free (gratis) applications can be replaced by free (libre) applications. That way you actually can run the software on your own machines.

I really enjoy posts like this. I've long had an idea to start a site like usesthis.com (The Setup) but to interview startups and ask them what tools and services they use internally.

At Crunchbase we were going to expand company profiles to include services and tools. We started with PR agencies and law firms[1], etc. as service providers, but we never found a chance to expand it to more general tools and services.

Does anybody know if a site like that already exists, or is anybody interested in implementing something like it?

[1] eg. look at http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook - down the left-hand side menu you'll find a section called 'Service Providers'

Yup, that's exactly what we're doing at Leanstack.io. Let's chat!

love the service! love the emails even better.

Interesting. I run a crunchbase like application, http://octopus.org. Octopus is focused on Marketing apps specifically but I'm thinking of ways to add more value. For example, every dev/company that adds an app to the site is given a profile but I've not really done much in the way of adding tools and services as you mention.

I don't think it does really. Sites like leanstack.io exist but are not the same thing, they just provide lists of tools without the great context and human contact that usesthis has. Other sites have long interviews with founders without too much emphasis on the tools used.

I am currently adapting the usesthis approach to an idea that I have and would be very interested in chatting with you, or anybody else who's interested, to brainstorm on how to proceed with your idea.

We've actually have more detailed posts now (i.e. http://blog.leanstack.io/the-cloud-stack-that-helped-sendgri...). But I'm with you on context, we're going the interview route moving forward. Glad to chat with you and anyone else to brainstorm and see how I can be helpful though. Feel free to email me at yonas@leanstack.io.

http://weusethat.com/ looks promising, but it hasn't had a pull request merged in almost a year: https://github.com/weusethat/we-use-that

I would recommend FastMail over other mail services to founders. Its features are fairly comparable to gmail (and presumably windows live mail, though I haven't used it). Additionally, there are some advanced features that seem particularly useful to small companies: the capacity for setting up lots of aliases pointing to multiple destinations, the ability to add super cheap small-storage accounts (good for interns), the ability to share folders, and Sieve filter scripting support all come to mind.

They also have a pretty transparent, non-evil privacy policy. http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/02/updated-privacy-policy/

Plus, you're now supporting a small independent company! http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-st...

I wrote a blog post about switching from gmail to FastMail that will give you an idea of the service if you haven't seen it before. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

For email hosting I use zoho.com which offers a free tier for one domain and $36/year for more domains and features. I've been using them for a few months with one of my side projects (onewaybits.com) and recently started another project with another domain and decided to jump to the paid tier because I had such a good experience with their free tier.

zoho.com looks nice. But it only gives 20 accounts on the free tier. Windows live domains, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have a limit on the number of accounts.

Ah, didn't realize that. I'm a solo dev so I didn't run into that limit haha.

I also use zoho for my personal mail (for about a year so far), and I've also had a good experience.

I'll definitely consider it for a larger project. After Google closed the free tier of the Apps for Business service, I think they are the way to go for side projects :) (which will hopefully convert to paid if they do well!)

This is a nice list, and I've used most of the services myself to get small projects going. It's really great how you can quickly get a project off the ground for free, and then only start paying if it really does take off.

However, this is one of the problems with all of these services, they are very expensive. Once you do need to start paying for them, they quickly become much more expensive than investing a little time into running your own servers, at least that's the case with Heroku, MongoHQ, and Amazon S3. I always like to remember that my project is not a 'Heroku' Node app, for example, it's a Node app that happens to be deployed on Heroku now, and needs to be deployable on something else in the future at short notice.

Agreed, these are very expensive once you have to start paying for them. But good, nonetheless, for getting the MVP out and start getting some traction.

Is there any value anymore in using a platform or service like Heroku or MongoHQ? You could get a decent VM for as little as $5, and deployment isn't really as much of a pain anymore. IMO, using all these different services takes more time, is more expensive, and is less flexible.

Yep, I was thinking about it.

You can get a VM cheaply, but then you have to manage everything yourself. I don't have a lot of experience in this field and would be completely lost if something suddenly goes down or I need to scale. With Heroku and MongoHQ, you don't have to worry about these things anymore and its really easy to set up. And for someone like me who would need several hours in setting up everything on my own server, even the paid plans don't sound too expensive.

I would agree with this except for the, "you don't have to worry about it." If it scales by a huge amount over a weekend when you get some exposure, for example, then the costs can surely increase very quickly?

I think I would rather have things overload and go down than have a remote service be able to handle it but charge me a fortune.

You make a very good point. But I would rather have a business model in place which means that if things overload, so does my bank account.

I wish more startups would start up with this premise in mind, as at the moment I'm looking for specific services for my company, and I have the added task of trying to determine if the cool startup I'm looking at has a business model in place so that I don't have to worry about looking for a replacement for them next year when they close down.

(And yes, I'm looking for stuff which my company can pay for, not freebies)

The only services with my payment information are Heroku and Amazon. On Heroku, the first dyno is completely free and it doesn't increase the number of dynos automatically. But when you have heavy traffic, you can easily scale the number of dynos.

Amazon does charge automatically and doesn't have a limit on the maximum amount I want to spend, so there is a risk there. But then, its not too expensive even if I get a lot of traffic.

I agree with you, up to a point. You need someone with some experience to set those things up. I mean, obviously even with these alternate solutions you still need to be security conscious. However, I went the AWS route and set up my whole environment running Ubuntu Server with Apache/RDS/S3... but despite all of my best efforts, I'm a programmer. I'm so afraid that I left some stupid setting in some obscure file unchanged that will give someone a backdoor to my server or database. With some of these platforms as a service they force you to use best practices, where you could set it up yourself with a not-so-strong password or something.

Uhhh, I think some of these are NOT free?

Specifically: Heroku, MongoHQ, Amazon S3

Heroku has a free tier, Amazon has a 'first year free' tier for a lot of their products these 2 I'm using at the moment.

No idea about MongoHQ.

I think the free stuff is basically for making and running an MVP, not for running at scale...

Cool, thanks for clarifying!

MongoHQ also has a free tier. Good for getting the MVP out

Does anyone else have any experience with Ink File Picker? I recently learned about the service and am considering it for an upcoming project, but I have concerns about entrusting a startup with a critical piece of infrastructure and would hate to have to re-write file uploads if Ink gets bought or decides to shutdown. We've already experienced this with SimpleGeo and had to re-write quite a bit of code when they pivoted.

We use it at http://virtualstagingsolutions.com and rely heavily on file uploads. We started using it right when they launched (back when they were filepicker.io) and initially there were some bugs with resizing images. Lately everything has worked pretty well. Their support seems pretty responsive and I've only noticed 1 period of downtime within the last 6 months or so which completely made it impossible for our users to upload anything.

I'll admit that I'm not 100% comfortable using them because I'm really not sure where they are going in the future, by the looks of their pricing plans it seems like they would need huge scale to turn a profit and I just don't see them getting that scale at the moment.

For what it's worth, we (Tinfoil Security) have a free plan, but also offer 6 months free to Startups of any of our plans. We also, like MixPanel, offer a free partner program: https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/partner

In any case, MixPanel is another great free tool we use all the time. Their partner program is great too.

Mail gun for email, especially with their new pricing.

This pricing? http://www.mailgun.com/pricing

Curious what the attractiveness is, considering both Amazon SES and SendGrid charge 10c/1,000 emails from the start. You have to push significant volume at MailGun to reach 10c/1,000 eventually, but at that level MessageBus is pretty competitive.

Mailgunner here. One of the things that differentiates Mailgun is that we don't gate features, all our features are available for all customers. We've found that a lot of customers don't have a lot of volume (say only 5000 emails per month) but the want inbound email parsing, email validation, complete tracking and analytics, and detailed logs through our events API. You can do all this, even on our free plan with 10,000 emails per month. So, its really what you value at what price. Hope that helps.

Got it and thanks, makes sense. For low-volume, seems like proper comparison would've been Mandrill, but your guys' feature set seems to be richer.

You can go with Mandrill by mailchimp and get 12K free per month... https://mandrill.com/pricing/

Interesting. I had a look at your Start-Up. It looks very interesting, but I'm not a developer and would love to see something that could display my social contributions the way you're doing it for developers.

Do you have anything like this on the cards?

Thanks. This is our first version and we focused mainly on keeping this simple so that we can get it out and test our idea. We didn't want to get our hands on OAuth for this version which is why there are some obvious ones (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc.) missing. One of our biggest goals with Shyahi is to create an app that anyone can use. We will be adding more services soon.

OK, Great. Do you have a mailing list or FB page for updates?

I like the post, and it showed me some services that I didn't know about.

What advantage does Amazon's Route 53 have over Cloudflare? I've been using Cloudflare for all my DNS and CDN needs so I'm curious what Route 53 would have to offer.

Almost identical list for my side project, except using Modulus.io for my platform hosting (takes the pain out of deploying Meteor apps). Didn't know about Windows live domain being free which is useful.

Thanks for posting!

> Didn't know about Windows live domain being free which is useful.

With Google Apps not being free anymore, Windows live domains was the best we could find. Not sure if someone knows of a better service thats free as well.

Good list. With Heroku, you should checkout papertrail[1] for logging. It is also free for small volumes.

[1] https://papertrailapp.com

Yes, we are actually using Papertrail for logging. Missed that one.

Hey sdiw, check out http://errormator.com - Since you are starting out I would be more than happy to provide you with one of our better accounts for free (our free tier is enough for most young startups, but i want to give you something better for start).

It will provide you with exception tracking, various performance metrics and log aggregation.

Looks really good, thanks. I will shortly send you an email through the contact form on Errormator.

You can email me directly at info@errormator.com, I can help you guys if you will need advice with integration or give pointers how to do some tricks to make most out of our service.

That would be great. Thanks again!

I found MailChimp is good to build a list of leads. And their free tier is 2,000 users and 12,000 emails per month.

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