A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy.<p>E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad. rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO’s insistence that we switch to a different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution.<p>Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won’t give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other’s salaries.<p>We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday, salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going forward with the departed colleague’s plan to move all our infrastructure to DO.<p>So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT department is so behind the times and won’t let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.<p>(All that said, my job isn’t bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my job is to wrangle it.)

Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups&#x27; money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt.<p>For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used by other small startups.

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren&#x27;t worth it in a small startup:<p>1. You don&#x27;t need Slack ($13 &#x2F; month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype<p>2. Notion ($16 &#x2F; month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder<p>3. Sentry ($26 &#x2F; month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment<p>4. Cloudflare ($20 &#x2F; month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough<p>5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 &#x2F; month), SalesQL ($29 &#x2F; month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don&#x27;t and if not, then they aren&#x27;t worth the monthly subscription<p>6. Figma ($24 &#x2F; month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven&#x27;t seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it

You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating.<p>This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of <i>all</i> inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

From the other side (vendor perspective) we see this SaaS fatigue a lot.<p>We have a free, open source, unlimited use product that has a very good, commercial, alternative. What we hear in calls is that there are just too many SaaS tools in the company and the monthly cost (or security review of all tools) ends up with the management saying &quot;pick your top 5,10,15 most important&quot; and drop the rest.<p>The GSuites, Slacks, AWS, Notions, Zooms, etc (picking from the article list) get in the top priority list and that list is so full the medium priority stuff just gets crossed out and pushed down to budgets lower down. Our category just rarely makes it.<p>A lot of the time we win out just because the company wants to avoid the admin of the paid solution, the tool just isn&#x27;t _that_ important. Being creative in your business model, I think, is the way to go, particularly in terms of freemium offerings.<p>With the number of SaaS apps trying to get your monthly cost, being outside the core list is getting harder and harder and you need to define those niches and totally own them. Forget starting at the company level, start with 1-5 people groups for a _long_ time.

A one-person startup uses not less than yours :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-boring-technology-behin...</a><p>It&#x27;s a good thing that we can outsource tasks to 3rd party SaaS for a small fee, rather than hiring full-time employees

It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use.<p>I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usegripeless.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usegripeless.com</a>). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptical too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration took less than 10 minutes.<p>Turns out it’s more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue to drive much more revenue than it costs.<p>That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on additional tools. I’m not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don’t work.

I’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also cheaper.<p>I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it.<p>I think if you got the full teams&#x2F;one-note experience on the essential plan that it might be better, but you don’t get the full experience in the browser. One example is that you can use Excel inside Onenote in the browser. But since I don’t really like slack or the g-suite stuff either, it’s basically the same with less hassle.

I believe the attention cost of using and keeping up with so many great tools is underappreciated. Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I&#x27;d rather use Github Projects than Trello not because GHP is better (it is not) but because I&#x27;m already using Github, and the mental and workflow cost of adding Trello to the mix is (I feel) higher than its additional value.<p>Notion in particular drives me nuts. I mean it&#x27;s very very well done, but you use it to create a hierarchy of collaborative documents... because apparently GSuite docs are not good enough? Notion I think is a case of local maxima, because Gdocs&#x2F;Office365 offer so many more ways to keep documentation and data in better formats (doc, sheet, slides...).<p>Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of a thousand good things. :)

IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.

Company I work for has grown to 10 people and the pricing per member things are getting out of hand. We had to drop some services, bc if there is a service that costs 10 per user for just one feature, it&#x27;s they add up real quick (looking at you slack for example).<p>Some services have free tier or special pricing if it&#x27;s only couple of members, but once you exhaust that, you are dropped to full pricing. I think there is a opportunity for different pricing for growing companies between 5-25 people.<p>It seems that this pay per member works for small companies, couple of people or huge ones. But if you are growing with limited revenue the costs are way too high while you are still also finding your market.

I have concluded that existing businesses and other certain factors limit the application of what I am about to say to a subset, but there is great room for a holistic &quot;here is your IT stack&quot; company that focuses on open source tooling, reduction of stack complexity, and working out many of the oft-repeated learning curves.<p>It&#x27;s a huge market opportunity waiting to happen, because death or at least injury by a thousand licensing fee cuts is real. Small startups, small businesses looking to modernize, non-profits, etc would all be potential customers, and unlike the coast-centric viewpoint of HN, those tend to actually be the vast majority of companies in middle America.<p>Many MSP&#x27;s and various resellers and salesmen make a living off trapping these in lock-in also. I have seen all of this over many years first hand. There is a reason Spiceworks took off so fast. There is also a reason they are hemorrhaging customers... because Spiceworks entire model was built around advertising lock-in type products to customers. (also their tooling sorta sucks, despite being easy and having a decent web front-end)

Sublime Text isn&#x27;t free. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimehq.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sublimehq.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;text</a>

I feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably condense them into a centralized spot.

It&#x27;s fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github. When I add a few staff members, I&#x27;ll happily pay for Slack and Notion.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it&#x27;s worth it. If I close one deal, it&#x27;s worth it. But really I love that I can set up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend my time thinking about higher-value things.<p>I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really expensive as you scale, but I&#x27;m pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly cost.

&gt; FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)<p>If the service you&#x27;re providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You don&#x27;t need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the books.<p>It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you&#x27;re not willing to pay $x&#x2F;month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to change to make it worth $x&#x2F;month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y (or $x+y? Are you under charging?)<p>Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your product!

What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team?<p>Also Github? You can now have private repos with up to three collaborators for free.

Please consider paying&#x2F;donating for smaller “free” tools like sublime etc.

It would be interesting to see this kind of list for the &quot;start-ups&quot; in &#x27;90s. I guess Windows and MS Office licenses would be unavoidable items on the list.

Remember when web pages linked to other web pages?

I feel this on a near-spiritual level.<p>Once you factor in communication tools (including but not limited to...project management, email, calendar, chat, VOIP, and CRM) alongside your &quot;real&quot; technical stuff that actually powers your services or products, you invariably end up with a ton of different tools because nobody has the time to even <i>try</i> to build all those different core components.<p>There&#x27;s a ton of friction to doing anything differently. For example, I&#x27;m fairly anti-google. Therefore, I host my own email. Doing that, even in the most simplistic way possible, means utilizing several tools or technologies (mailinabox + a deliverability service being the most simplistic I can imagine). A larger operation would certainly have more specific needs that would require another approach - and the human effort of implementation and maintenance that goes with it.<p>We have a handful of people, in 3 different countries, each requiring differing currencies (USD, GBP, EURO). Our client base is global. Combine the operational complexity with everything else and even a small operation can start to feel like a fortune 500 company.

As a B2B startup building an enterprise product, we&#x27;ve had to be wary of using external services as a part of our offering. Our customers prefer predictable&#x2F;fixed-annual pricing and do not sign up for saas pricing models, especially the ones that cost a lot at scale. Also, this eats into our margins as the external service has no obligation&#x2F;contract to reduce prices.

I&#x27;m rewatching Mad Men now, and I&#x27;m amazed how many people in that era were busy on administrative tasks that are completely automated now – set on 2010s, this series would be about a boutique digital agency that would employ under 10 people, total. This list of software may be long, but without it, it wouldn&#x27;t be possible to do this with just a 2-person team.

Truth is you don&#x27;t need most of SaaS when you start. No-one is saying this out-loud because a lot of SaaS users are also SaaS selles.<p>Sentry, use free tier or self host or use Bugsnag free tier<p>Slack, use Skype instead<p>Notion, use Google Docs instead<p>AirTable, use Google Sheets<p>Office&#x2F;coworking, work from home or cafes!<p>These huge usage of other SaaS is caused by venture backed companies with a lot of cash looking for an IPO. In practice if you are boostraped instead of venture based you don&#x27;t want to have a lot of SaaS and&#x2F;or hire a lot of employees. Some things like bragging about how many employees or SaaS you are using only make sense in venture-back land because by spending more you are getting to the IPO&#x2F;exit faster but you are sacrificing future long term margins (which you don&#x27;t care about since you will be long gone).<p>I&#x27;m a solo bootstrap founder and yes you can clearly see how I&#x27;m biased against venture-backed startups! :D

I was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the tools are used for development.<p>I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they&#x27;re at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing.<p>So all in all, it makes sense; they&#x27;re paying for what they deem required to use. I couldn&#x27;t justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that stage.<p>[1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply.<p>On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I don&#x27;t understand <i>why</i> they&#x27;re paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth paying for, but they don&#x27;t strictly <i>need</i> to.

If you’re using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a pretty bad experience. I’d spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your dyno is always up.

That&#x27;s a bit scary on one hand, it&#x27;s pretty amazing though how much free value you can get from OS or Freemium tools. We use e.g. the free versions of RocketChat and Gitlab, they work great and we didn&#x27;t have many problems administrating them (once a short outage due to a full disk, but gitlab.com had multiple outages in the same time frame). So I think if you are willing to put a little effort into self hosting you have a lot of choices available. Deployment and maintenance has become easier as well with tools like Ansible and Docker.

I wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I&#x27;m wondering about: - time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever get (some of them it&#x27;s trivial, others not so much) - time to do security reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it (which is most of them) - the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of valuable history)

Why use both Notion <i>and</i> Trello for product&#x2F;feature planning?

28 tools, and no password manager? Oof.<p>For &quot;core&quot; accounts, make sure you&#x27;ve got 2FA on. Google for starters. Also anything to do with code, hosting, or finances.

Why is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It&#x27;s decent for chat in a small Startup.<p>Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an overkill.

I was curious way the author used Slack for 2 people until I saw their SaaS is a plugin for Slack. As I mentioned in my other comments, startups selling a SaaS spend so much time writing copies and doing sales pitch of how their SaaS product is a must-have that they start to believe that also others SaaS are must-have.<p>SaaS selling to SaaS might turn into a Ponzi piramid scheme if left unchecked.

Subscribe to Zoho One. 40+ integrated apps at $30 &#x2F;user &#x2F;month with an annual subscription (All Employee Pricing).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;one&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;one&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zoho.com&#x2F;one&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;d be interested to see your disaster recovery plans for each choice you&#x27;ve made. When any of those fail what do you do for continuity? How do you back up your data?<p>What&#x27;s your failover time between the site being down or other issue and being able to switch to different service?<p>Or is there no plan because all websites are assumed always up... ?

There are certain dev tools like Gitlab&#x2F;Github or AWS&#x2F;GCP for your product. Besides can&#x27;t things be simplified to just a couple of tools<p>Like just 1. Gsuite&#x2F;Office 365 2. Asana&#x2F;Notion<p>I am building a startup (Early stages) &amp; think about this. I want to create one or two tools &amp; use it.<p>Why need airtable, notion &amp; trello at the same time?

One thing i&#x27;ve noticed about markets is that when there a little to choose from you buy few tools, but expect them to do more, and you are prepared to invest time into learning them. However if there are a lot to choose from, you want more simple tools, dont want to invest time, and prefer the tools you already know.

For about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we live in!

Some open source companies offer free use of their product if your product or organisation is open source as well. For our tool[0] we got offered free use of Gitlab Gold and a Sentry account for error tracking.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;websecuritymap.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;websecuritymap.org&#x2F;</a>

We at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free versions of most services (helps that we’re only 2 people) and essentially are only paying for AWS. We’ve always found that there are cheap high quality alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 &#x2F; month.

What is the value of Figma ($24 &#x2F; month for Designing product mocks..) Why not just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious, as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is there some USP?

I am running a small bootstrapped venture and use a lot of very low cost apps. It works well, particularly as integration tools become much more sophisticated. Loosely coupled looks messy but wins over tightly coupled big enterprise systems

I have made this tool, which tries to help with this kind of situation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aamu.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aamu.app&#x2F;</a><p>It already has quite a bit of features, but more features come quite regularly.

why don&#x27;t you use basecamp ? It does says it replaces quite a number of tools.

I wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?

Suddenly my lab&#x27;s Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity tools with linked accounts.

Find it interesting that they&#x27;re paying for premium versions of all those tools yet are using free heroku dynos.. Doesn&#x27;t that result in their app sleeping?

&gt; FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)<p>Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?

gsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code, slack, discord<p>partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and bitbucket.

Slack, Notion, Airtable, Figma, Sentry (maybe), Hubspot<p>seem to be really unnecessary subscriptions since there are actually better free or one-time payment alternatives.

Thanks for the list. Curious how does Mixplanel compare to Google Analytics? Is it for similar use-case or different?

This is brought home to me whenever I take the time to document a process.

Some of the listed paid services either has free alternatives or can be easily DIY or self hosted on light vm or raspberry PI with fair enough functionality if you do not want to pay for them. Including error monitoring, topic&#x2F;channel chatroom, git server.

During a gold rush, sell shovels<p>During a shovel rush, sell shovel making tools

What&#x27;s the advantage of Robo 3T over Mongo compass?

Airtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?

I really don&#x27;t get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some features, but for the most part it works.

Please link to all the tools!

i wonder if that leaves them any time to work on their own product

And your hardware took 100&#x27;s of tools to make. So what?

SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it&#x27;s practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it.<p>Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

No VS Code? Really?

I noticed this:<p><pre><code> LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 &#x2F; month) - Finding leads to contact SalesQL ($29 &#x2F; month) - Finding email addresses for leads </code></pre> I don&#x27;t know who these people are, but it looks like their business involves spamming people.

I may be lazy but I had to do math to figure out what you spend. Maybe total it? Just as a litmus test.

My two-person startup only uses one SaaS - Twilio, to send Prometheus alarms to my phone, which costs just a few cents at this volume. We use Freenode IRC instead of Slack, but that barely counts. For meetings we set up a Mumble instance, which is the most reliable setup I&#x27;ve tried. All of our infrastructure is on owned hardware, colocated. For taking notes I use text files.<p>More to the point of what these folks are using: Mixpanel, Fullstory, Hubspot, SalesQL, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are unethical and you should not use them. It&#x27;s not &quot;growth hacking&quot;, it&#x27;s spam. You are a spammer. Drift is annoying, no one likes your chat widget. Seems to me like these guys are drinking the kool-aid pretty hard.