Create a saas, but do you pay for saas ?
#ask-ih it's a meta-question, but as indie hackers, do you also consume other people's saas? Which one do you use?
How much do you spend every month for them ?
Personally I don't pay for any online service and I think is a good point (saving money!), but also a bad one (not understanding properly customer behaviour?)
Actually I spend no money on third-party services. Your question gives me a suggestion: now I'm curious about how many free services I'm using around my side-projects, I have to list them and understand why I'm using them.
For my side projects (for now all tests) for sure heroku for hosting app and postgres, mongodb atlas for testing with nosql databases
I definitely spend money on other services, between outsourcing email, system monitoring, et cetera.
Don't have my P&L in front of me, but I'd say I'm only spending ~100$ per month collectively for a handful of services. That obviously doesn't include any services I'm able to use in a free capacity.
Want to deep dive into why I say I'm "outsourcing" to those companies. As somebody with a family, day job, and multiple side hustles, my time is extremely limited. I look at using those services as a way to either free up my own time, or to do better work than I could do on my own.
Sure, I could build out most of what I currently pay for, but would it be as good? Would I drown in maintenance? Would I be able to dedicate the same amount of time that a team of people can throw at it?
The answer tends to be "no" so for me, spending a small bit of money to outsource to other services ends up paying off in quality and free time.
I agree, which services do you use?
One I could use right now is a simple "starter kit": define some kind of mockups, technology stack and hire someone to kickoff project. After this first step, I think for sure I will use monitoring system to check everything is fine for me