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I run a one-person business. I pay for 25 SaaSes
by
Maaike
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1598677731750838274
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That's nuts. I pay for only 3:
Not a fan of recurring fees, unless absolutely necessary.
It's like taking a permanent pay cut.
I'm a solo founder with 6-figure ARR for perspective.
There's a lot of free options btw. Back in the days, I've created this list to keep track of them. Maybe it can be helpful :)
https://github.com/maxprilutskiy/awesome-side-project
Very cool! Bookmarked and Starred. :)
I noticed that CI/CD didn't include CircleCI. I know GitHub actions is pretty cool, but CircleCI has a great free tier and a lot of free functionality. Might be worth adding.
What a great collection you've built there. Thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome! I’m glad it helps.
I run Solo SaaS business and pay for 3 Sasses
That's it.
AWS SES
Hetzner
GSuite
Cloudflare
Godaddy
and the crazy thing is, I haven't even started selling...
But even when building, it is worth it.
Notes: Going full on AWS/GCP is probably worth it, but I felt you pay so much to begin with and eventually, few years down the line, you pull out of there back to owned servers, so why not start training on that case right now. On second thoughts I am having right now, it was probably a mistake and I should have went with AWS. I thought it would be easier for me. Not recommending that way.
GCP has free credits for starting, and a free tier. For MVPs, it's a good way to start.
I used to do GCP, it takes a lot of time as an indie hacker to start something, by the time you have something, the credits ends and you start paying hundreds of $$.
GCP has a free tier. The infrastructure is really good. Scaling is built-in. GCP offers something for bootstrapped developers as well as for enterprise.
you can get 1000$ worth of credits on aws by using their activate program. Just FYI in case you are not aware of it.
AWS is can be 2-3 times gcp and like 20 times hetzner.
I created a Nomad+consul+patroni+vault+etcd based cluster on hetzner.
I regret it now, should have gone with kubernetes because it took a lot of time but what done is done. So I will continue on that way for now. I will probably continue to regret it in the future. Hopefully it will get better as time goes by.
If all goes well, I will release the recipe someday.
Thanks.
I pay for Azure.
Actually, I don't pay for Azure, the free plan gets me really far
I pay for -
I pay for:
-Vercel
-GitHub
I've been subscribed to a few for years without using them.
We need a tool that can keep track of our paid subscriptions.
Software I pay for on a recurring basis:
How did I end up with these? Easy: most had free tiers that covered me for free until my business grew big enough :)
We tried some low-code and no-code tools. Try to reduce the cost of hiring engineers.
Well, as a one-person business, you really have to calculate the Return-On-Investment and the Opportunity Costs. There's only so many productive work hours in a day.
If you make 5k of revenue a month and a tool that costs you $150 (e.g. ahrefs for better SEO) increases that revenue by 20%, isn't it worth it?
Same if you pay for a Platform-As-A-Service such as Heroku, which might cost $200 instead of $50 when using Amazon AWS, but it saves you an average of 10 hours a month in configuration time or headaches and less downtime. Well, that depends on how you value your time. This might be different when your app is in its first steps or if it's already at 10k MRR.
Geez, I wounder if you could make it at leat through a SaaS project with all the freemium Apps available an the market today
We currently use the following for our feedback tool ruttl
Honestly I completely get your point, if these tools help you reach a bigger audience and streamlines your processes/makes it easier and saves time, it is honestly worth paying for them.
Pay for AWS (it contains a lot of tools that I need in my SAAS project)
vidiq
canva
This is quite interesting @Maaike. I would like to know how did you start and how do you now manage to keep the SaaS up and running. Since I am starting out in the indie dev journey I would love to know a few learnings of others that I can utilize to my own benefit. I would also love to know what is your MRR if you have a side hustle and how did you reach that MRR?
Also, may I ask, how much time do you spend in front of a screen working throughout the day? 4 hrs ? 6 hrs? or more?
That is a lot! I'd say if it essential tool it is worth keeping. I sort out your list of some I do use and I found it very time and cost-saving. Good luck
I also run a one person business. Here are mine:
Glad I'm not the only one with a long list of SaaS. Mine is a little different from yours, I'm a bit too reliant on Adobe, haha. I also have a few that I could probably do without but it's just another thing on my to do list.
Initially, I thought this sounded like a lot but after reading the list and your justifications in the comments, I'd say this is about right. If you actually use them and they save you time/are valuable in other ways then they are worth it. The problem comes in when you spend a fortune on SaaS you don't need or use which can be the case with many small businesses.
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