SaaS We Happily Pay For

&gt; We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration.<p>This is so important! This can go wrong even at large companies. At Netflix we once had a billing issue and it took a while to even notice, because no one in the company was paying for it (it was just free for everyone), but it looked like just general attrition, not people slowly having failed payments.<p>After that incident, the company gave everyone a $16&#x2F;mo raise (which is what it cost to have streaming and DVDs at the time) and then asked us all to set up our own payment. The goal was to have everyone paying and hopefully using different payment methods, so that if something went wrong at least a few employees would be aware of it.

&quot;Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy&#x2F;pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff.&quot;<p>Thanks for the mention Francesco. I&#x27;m Philippe, one of the co-founders of Missive [1], don&#x27;t hesitate if you have any questions.<p>p.s. We are a tiny team (4) too and use many SaaS ourselves.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missiveapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missiveapp.com&#x2F;</a>

If you go to that Linear one’s site on an iPhone and zoom in really fast on their image of the todo list client, it immediately restarts your phone.

I really appreciate this list. It&#x27;s cool to see how people work, and I&#x27;m sure the folks building the services you&#x27;re using appreciate the kind words.<p>I also had kind of a strange reaction to it, which I tried to figure out, and I&#x27;ll explain it in case it&#x27;s at all representative of other reactions being posted here.<p>I think it&#x27;s just kind of intimidating to read a list of SaaS someone else uses. After reading the whole list, in the back of my head I&#x27;m imagining the burden of learning all of these all at once, of managing a dozen new passwords and payments I&#x27;m not currently managing, etc, and I&#x27;m not imagining an improvement to my own workflow because my work doesn&#x27;t match yours.<p>It&#x27;s easy to imagine getting zero or negative value out of any SaaS if it&#x27;s not solving a problem I personally have.<p>But on the other hand it&#x27;s hard to imagine getting less than 12&#x2F;mo for any service that is doing something for me. And it&#x27;s hard to imagine that a 3 person team mistakenly believes they like some service they&#x27;re using.<p>So I&#x27;ll skip the judgment about how you&#x27;re spending money on improving your work environment and say thanks for the post.

SavvyCal looks interesting, but for a &quot;lean operation&quot; can you really justify paying $12 per month per user for a service to schedule meetings? All of GSuite starts at $6&#x2F;mo, and already does this.

really interesting reading the comments where people are trying to cost optimize, and then others justifying the costs by time saved. Seems to me both ways of thinking about this is the wrong mindset. The more important thing is the operational &quot;flow&quot;, how your toolsets come together to allow you to operate your business. Trying to micro optimize costs is not terribly useful, one sass offering on it&#x27;s own may not terribly justify itself, but because they way it connects with other pieces of your operation, the overall flow is better, and therefore justified. It&#x27;s the difference between an &quot;accountants&quot; way of seeing a business vs systematic thinking. Much important to think about how the &quot;whole&quot; than the parts.

SaaS I happily pay for:<p>- CloudFlare<p>- Roam<p>- Slack<p>- Linear<p>- Geekbot<p>SaaS I’m okay with paying for:<p>- Figma<p>- Gsuite<p>- Gusto<p>- Stripe<p>- Netlify<p>SaaS I’d rather not pay for, but have no choice:<p>- AWS (SaaS in a sense I suppose - I actually don’t “pay” yet, working my way through credits)<p>- Heroku (terribly expensive and does not provide startup credits that they say they do)<p>- Wistia (the platform is clunky, but there’s no other video platforms I’ve found with the features I need)

Linear looks fascinating.<p>We’re using Zenhub now and it’s slow and misused in our org (one giant project board instead of separate boards per repo &#x2F; project).<p>Curious if anyone here is &#x2F; has used linear and could compare their experience with it to Monday, Asana or Zenhub?

While I think it&#x27;s great you&#x27;re thinking of tools to optimize your time BUT a team of 3 at early stage project&#x2F;startup level should be a bit more frugal and look for clever ways to save the ~$200&#x2F;month you&#x27;re spending right now!<p>I understand you have your own SAAS and want to justify subscription and this is a good promo method.<p>I&#x27;ve written on HN before that I&#x27;m TIRED of subscription apps, specially per user subs, for no reason! I went on a mission and cut the cord on almost all them. We honestly do not miss a single one. You&#x27;d be surprised how many great FOSS (free &amp; open source software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN DATA!!!

I pay for a container selfhosting provisionong software &#x2F; Paas which I selfhost on a digital ocean host: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudron.io</a><p>It helps me focus on being productive and not trying to be a hosting provider to myself.

I am not a big fan of SaaA products, and $500&#x2F;mo seems like a lot for the utility you are getting, but I just wanted to say I love your site design.<p>I was going to ask how you built it--but there was a post 2 days ago with the details! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;francescodilorenzo.com&#x2F;blog-setup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;francescodilorenzo.com&#x2F;blog-setup</a><p>Thanks for making your corner of the web a nicer place

After reading the comments, whether SaaS is worth it seems to depend on a company&#x27;s circumstances.<p>A company that depends on capital from investors likely needs to grow at a certain rate, and SaaS can help with that. For a company that&#x27;s self funded and does not need to grow quickly, using FOSS instead of SaaS can be very beneficial. As usual, YMMV.

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci&#x2F;actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API&#x2F;webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn&#x27;t be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you&#x27;re building.<p>You don&#x27;t even need GSuite&#x2F;Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10&#x2F;year domain license and $5&#x2F;month&#x2F;user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.

&quot;A program worth using is worth buying&quot;<p>- hacker&#x2F;cracker culture

Really nice to see Savycal here. I follow the podcast and wish it a great deal of success :)

A bit off topic, does anyone know a guide or a good starting point to build landing page that look that clean and modern. For example the landing page for this website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycal.com&#x2F;</a>

An alternative to Vercel and more budget friendly is AWS Amplify console. Costs just a few cents per build, connects with GitHub and you have multiple environments. I’ve had a decent experience - though far from perfect, justifies the cost.

Just to shout out to whimsical.com, I am so happy to use it every time.<p>I tried Linear, the interface is bit too bland to my taste. I am going to give it another try since there are so many good words about it in comments.

Try zoho. Zoho has lot of breadth and depth being very economical.

MIRO If I ever grow to a large enough org, I will RUN towards paying for a Miro subscription. I will insist on religious level use of it. It is such a game changer.

For our team, Gitlab&#x27;s silver tier has been a great bank for the buck. Lots of good project management and infra tools on top of a decent git product.

Restyaboard has been a game-changer for us. It has helped us organize our employee&#x27;s workflow and project management.

I pay for 1TB Onedrive and a valid Ms Office license. ~60USD yearly is ok

No Atlassian products!

What are the things you <i>unhappily</i> pay for?

Sincerely hoping to make this list next year

the linear.app website crashes safari&#x2F;ios when you zoom in on the first image (the one showing the app)

Missive - a comment box on an email to discuss emails.<p>I cant help but wonder why not just send an email.