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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

I'm more certain every day that there is a place in the market for a company offering "subscription management" service. Manage all SaaS for a business (or personal as well!), keeping costs low and utilization high. Provide one central billing endpoint.

I would definitely use a service like that, both personally and professionally. The number of subscriptions I have is growing, and it's frustrating to keep up with all of them. I would love to have them all in one accessible place.

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Have been thinking about this for a while with a partner of mine and worked on a prototype, here are some screenshots:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cdbx6e27movkj8q/Contract%20Tags.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/goc2fextcdqb6qn/Contract%20View.pn...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rae05ubbnlgopqi/Add%20Contract.png...

If anyone is interested to chat about this some more, email is in my profile!

I thought about this too last year. Such a service could also audit your services list every so often and ask you if you're still using them. If not, they could remind you to cancel or cancel for you, saving you money.

Actually, this is a pretty good idea! It's going on my idea list.

Started working on one of those on a conceptual level. The main problem is that some of those services provide no management API nor want to resell, which would be the best source of revenue in my opinion. Without that, you have a glorified "I'm using this/that" list.

Yeah, another problem stemming from this is that in many cases the user would need to grant you full account access. Still, Mint is a good example of a product that was able to gain enough trust from users that it had full access to all bank accounts, so maybe such a requirement is not an inhibiting issue. Any good product would need to be backed by a solid team with trustworthy backgrounds, though. This likely wouldn't work as a side project.

If the service just provided "add a user, remove a user (hired, fired) and adjust billing appropriately", it would already be worth a lot and wouldn't need full account access.

Its mind-boggling how many accounts I still have for companies I don't work for anymore.

Agreed. I recently started work for a new company and they forgot to add me to some services so I needed to request access and then had to wait for them to get to it. A one-click "Add/Remove user for all our services" would be quite valuable in itself. And then the potential cost savings that could come from cancelling/reducing unused SaaS services would make it more valuable.

Yeah, that would work, but the issue is that if you want to support "every" SaaS company, you need to solve the problem of integrating an SaaS product that does not offer granular permissions. e.g. An "admin" account that could grant/revoke access to users might necessarily also have access to sensitive company data.

In fact, it's the sensitive data that is the issue that will generate the most resistance from potential customers. Companies probably care way less about trusting you with their credit cards than they do with trusting you with sensitive vertical-specific data. THEN AGAIN, people are putting their entire company communication into Slack so who really knows...

I run a SaaS business which requires pretty much full access to your GMail account (we don't require delete capabilities). Originally, I thought nobody would grant that much access over their email. But it surprised me how many people are willing to do that. Sure, there are some people who are wary and not do it but I think people on HN vastly over estimate the percentage. As you said, Mint is a great counter-example.

What we really need: an idea list manager and an endpoint for all of your ideas.

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