How I save $100+ a month with home-grown solutions

I'm going to have to disagree here. I find that with most tools the cost is usually well worth the time savings.

I fell into this trap early in my startup. I spent an entire month writing a CRM so that way we didn't have to pay for it. Sure I ended up saving $100-$200 a month, but at the cost of a month of lost business development time. But the worst part was realizing that my home grown tools would never be as good as the paid tool. Eventually we moved to Hubspot, and the CRM was just so much better than what I built. They have a chrome plugin that auto logs all my emails, sales templates, etc.. etc... Turns out when you have an entire team focusing on writing the tool, it's going to be better than what I can do in a month.

I can think of three good reasons to write your own tool.

## You Need a lot of Customization
Maybe you have really specific branding, and the tools just don't have a good way to portray this. Or maybe you have some sort of functionality that you absolutely need.
## The Cost Scales With You
Of course every tool is going to get more expensive as your business grows. What I really mean with this point, is be careful purchasing a tool that is going to take a large percentage of every customer you sign up. This is the main reason why I wrote all of our rendering technology for my SaaS. I would love to outsource that! But I also want to encourage our customers to use our product as much as possible, and with most video transcoders charging high hourly rates this was something we had to bring in house to keep that cost down.
## It's Core Business Functionality
Relying on others to ensure your business stays up and running is a risky move. Sure it would suck if your email software just disappeared, but you'd still be able to migrate and survive. But if you are selling a CRM software and are just white-labeling another tool, it could be the death of your company if they cut you off.

Looking at the tools you wrote yourself. I can definitely get behind writing your own knowledge base. Looks like it didn't take you that much time, and it looks really good and fits into your brand. If you were using a 3rd party tool I don't know if it would look as good.

For your support system, I think I can get behind that as well. Because I agree Intercom is stupid expensive. But there are other free tools like PureChat. However, it looks like the solution you got setup, didn't take you that much time to set this up.

I really can't get behind writing your own email drip software though. Looks like you spent a lot of time setting that up, and would imagine that you would have the same deliverability issues that you were having with your support. The biggest issue you are going to have is that only you can manage a software like this. If you ever bring someone in to help rewrite the content and sequence of your drips, anyone can figure out how to create a campaign in Drip. But with your software they will either have to be a programmer, or you will have to do all of that for them.

But hey! That's the best part about being an entrepreneur. You do you! I'm not your boss, you have 100% control over everything. So if you think this is best for you and your business, keep doing it.

Wow that's a great UI and idea :)

This is a nicely written advertisement.

Nice job Jen, product is not for me (my credit card company automatically does this for me), but I could see how there is a market for your product.