It's significant this is a SaaS company using these services. Some of the services have a cost based on team size, while others have a cost based on user base (and usage volume).<p>Services whose cost is f(team size): CircleCI, Trello, Github<p>Services whose cost is f(user base): MixPanel, Moz, Shopify<p>I mention this distinction because the f(team size) services generally offer solid value to any team, being useful and less expensive than paying someone to build the same thing in-house. OTOH the f(user base) products are a lot harder for consumer apps to justify than business apps. They do occasionally offer enterprisey premium features like platinum support, but the main pricing scheme is based on X whatever's per month, and a SaaS company charging lawyers $100/user/month is a lot more likely to afford it than a casual gaming website with a million users and a some ads.
It's worth pointing out that, according to their team page [0], Sawhorse Media has zero dedicated backend engineers (apart from maybe their CTO). So, in their case, the alternative would be to hire someone just to manage these things (sysadmin, engineer, or whatever). In this case, I can see why they would make the choice of outsourcing everything.<p>But if you already have an in-house engineering team who is reasonably competent at maintaining services, the tradeoff is probably different.<p>[0] <a href="http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/" rel="nofollow">http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/</a>
There's a lot of unnecessary costs listed. For example, they spend $165.00 on dropbox for the team, but also use Gmail services (meaning they have Google accounts which come with a free 10GB of storage).<p>The tier of MailChimp they use implies their list is in excess of 110,000 subscribers, and since I do a lot of email marketing for my company, I can guess their open rate is probably somewhere in the 10-20% range, so they are throwing money away on emails that go to spam boxes or never get opened/engaged.<p>They use a 3rd party team chat service instead of hosting their own local XMPP service (this is a non-critical service I would wager, and could afford some downtime if the server needed maintenance).<p>All in all, they are spending a lot on things that aren't really necessary. They could bring some of those things in-house and probably save a lot per year as well (low-critical things that would require minimal maintenance).<p>This is not even mentioning the <i>lack</i> of flexibility they get locked into by using only 3rd party solutions. I've seen this at my company for the few external things we do depend on -- you end up building business practices <i>around</i> the 3rd party service, which may or may not be optimal or how you would normally do things. Having that flexibility, and assurance that service X doesn't go away tomorrow really can improve work-flows and peace of mind.<p>Seems their business is based entirely around other 3rd parties ... something that would make my company very nervous to say the least.
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.<p>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.
I was thinking man - they don’t even have 1 really expensive SaaS product on the list… $60k for all those solutions seems very very cheap. Just setting up an open-source alternative to something that costs <$500/yr probably ends up costing you more - without upgrades and management.
I wonder how many of those service are at a "just in case" level? I see a number of products I have/do use, but the team only needed a smaller version of. (for instance, $97 for Github when a $25 org plan would work)
While interesting - there's often a free or opensource alternative for these "generic" SaaS services. You'd probably be spending just as much on this list if you used no SaaS products and hired an engineer to either maintain the open source versions or add similar custom functionality to your product/CMS/dashboard/somewhere. If you hired the engineer, you'd probably get the exact functionality you needed too.
this is really interesting - i work at an internal incubator at Intel ( new business initiatives ) ...and we don't use nearly this many services in our new ventures - so an interesting contrast for sure.<p>i interesting to see what breaks the 99 barrier
That's a lot of money spend for not so much in return, imho. Not to even mention the time spend on integration everything with each other. Which also equals are certain money amount.<p>I'm quite sure that for a lot, if not majority of the packages you pay for, there is a perfect open source, free to use alternatives. Which might require just as much time to integrate as it's paid alternative, but you will have full control, self hosted.<p>Also consider the impact of the information you are sharing with all these third parties. Might be a bigger concern then currently estimated.<p>Example, the dead man's snitch, it kind of leaks every time a cronjob runs/fails.