What tools do you use to run your service/product? I'll start.
EDIT: I've created a public notion page with all the SaaS products listed so far with the prices IH's are paying - I will try and keep it up to date:
https://www.notion.so/ab4efae8d89c48d5b6903d392e69681d?v=948d69d8a6d946ab9e14e125caafac83
Very curious what tools everyone's using to manage / run their saas. This is could include things like hosting -> live chat -> account tools. Thinking of building a list of common tools that can help indiehackers perform X.
My List:
Infrastructure
Analytics
- Plausible: $6/pm (highly recommend for privacy focused analytics)
Landing Pages
It was actually quite difficult to come up with this list! Ended up sifting through my emails to find receipts 🧾
Trending on Indie Hackers
The list for Divjoy:
Infrastructure
Email
Support
Total: $5/month
Of course, this won't last forever, but not bad considering Divjoy currently makes me enough to live off of 😊
@Gabe Thanks for sharing! That's actually really impressive that you've managed to get so much out of the free plans!
I'm curious - once you hit the mailchimp limit will you continue to use mailchimp or swap over to a different provider?
I'll probably keep using Mailchimp, since I easily get $50/m value from it and don't want to bother with migrating and worrying about affect on deliverability. I'm not quite as cheap as my list makes me out to be, just happened to turn out that way 🤷♂️
Makes sense! I only asked because I've seen a few people use it up until the free limit and then transition because they arent getting their value but glad you are
Yeah, I've definitely migrated off Mailchimp for past projects. For one switched to using my DB + mailgun to automate simple emails. Easier to justify with this one because any email I send to the list generally results in 2+ sales, which makes up for the cost.
@Gabe that's awesome to hear. Have you ever worried about Firebase cost spiking up? Also, curious if you have any future migration plans. (esp wrt auth, and firestore). Thanks.
Not going to worry about costs/migration until it becomes a problem. I could see moving to something else in the future that allows me to update parts of a user’s project (which is a giant json tree) instead of having to update the whole thing at once (stored as a string). I think Postgres might allow me to do this, but haven’t looked into it.
Cc @weekash.
Thanks Gabe.
To run tiiny.host here's my list:
Email
Customer Support
Infastructure
Project Management
Simple and cheap.
Actually just posted an article about my costs, and ways for you to save on expenses here: https://roland.imprint.to/post/5ebf7eb6a8e3ca00c2500ff8
Here's a rundown!
And this should all scale up, at a similar price, for AT LEAST the first 5,000 active users.
Hmmm, https://plausible.io/ looks quite similar to https://usefathom.com/, isn't it? 🤔
I love this question, and your list. I've been doing something similar for a while now.
So, I don't use all of these personally but I have a list of services I have used, reviewed or intended to use in the past, and I've been spending time recently making it searchable!
https://stackselect.tech/ is the result.
For that site in particular, and for a more direct answer to your question, I use:
That totals $9/mo for now.
Current monthly costs for Yomi.ai:
Netlify: $9/mo (for analytics)
GSuite Basic: $6/mo
GitHub: $0
Heroku: $0
RedisLabs Enterprise: $0
Sendgrid: $0
Stripe: $0
Awesome - thanks for sharing! That netlify analytics is pretty handy! I actually was on that and swapped to Plausible for three reasons:
I've also added your stack to the notion page
How were you able to get a custom domain with heroku for free?
I haven't listed the cost of the domain, which I bought via namecheap. I have it managed via netlify. I don't currently pay for heroku due to some credits I acquired through the GitHub education pack.
The list for Cruu:
Task & Team Management & Asynchronous Team Communication:
Synchronous Team Communication & Videochat
UI/UX
Infrastructure
Heroku: $6/month
AWS s3: $9/month
Growth
GSuite: $6
Godsend: $0 (free plan)
Payments
Stripe: 2.7% + 30cents
So far during development of PaceRank:
Infrastructure
Google Cloud: ~$40/month
Using services: Cloud SQL, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud DNS, Storage.
Cloud SQL is definitely eating most here, having both production environment and development environment database up.
Email
PostMark: 0$ (less then 100 emails)
Billing
Stripe: $0 🤷♂️
You can grab additional data for your notion page from a similar post I had in the past:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-your-side-project-6811b201e5?commentId=-M5Nd66W7Faw6sPkYULw
Our tech stack is
Source code, CI/CD: @gitlab
Hosting, Database, Auth: @Firebase
Frontend: Javascript (React)
Backend: Python, @googlecloud
CDN, DDoS: @Cloudflare
Analytics: @Google, @Cloudflare
All of them are free tier.
DigitalOcean - two servers, $10/mo total (one server for a Thumbnail API and one to test the cloud-init for userTrack
Gumroad - Comission based + $10/mo
Hostgator: shared hosting for different sites, WordPress sites and PHP applications $5/mo
Tawk.to (chat): Free
Trello - Free
Gmail - Free
Cloudflare - Free
For LinkStash
Mysql: $15 (Digital Ocean)
Server: $10 (Digital Ocean)
Auth0: $0 (less than 1000 users right now)
Gsuite: $12 (2 emails)
ConvertKit: $0
Trello: $0
Total : $37
The server and mysql are used by other projects so technically for now it's a shared expense between all my projects. But I decided to still count it as an expense.
PS: if you check the site the video is not there yet (still working on it) . However I have those two you can check out
Demo of bookmarks
Demo of newsletter
The beta is still a work in progress but those videos show you what the app would look like
I checked out your site, there is a video player on the site, but it's not clickable for me.
Hey, thanks for checking the site out. I'm sorry it didn't work, it's a placeholder for now 😅, working on the video for the landing page but you can see those demo videos I made:
Demo of bookmarks
Demo of newsletter
The beta is still a work in progress but those videos show you what the app would look like
Nice! How are you finding DO so far? I've added yours to the notion page
Digital Ocean is good so far. Their databases are great. The only issue with running your own server is you can't just deploy and the code is in production. To solve this I'm going to run CircleCI on my server, which will be triggered when I push to master
Great post!! Thanks for sharing your stack.
We use:
Project Management: Slack | Trello | Zoom
Customer Support / Database Management: Intercom
Landing Page: Wix
Infrastructure: Firebase, Plaid, Stripe, VGS
Email Marketing: Mailchimp / GSuite
Oh nice! How you finding plaid? I didn't know your prices so just took a guess at some but I've also added your stack to the notion page
Love the notion page! @hlucas Very effective, especially the tags!
PLAID has been vital for our company. I don't really know any fintech that doesn't use PLAID for their services. It's extremely easy to integrate with and their service team is extremely helpful.
Intercom price is marked as Zero. Do they provide a free account as well?
Intercom has a startup program that you can apply for. It's usually $500 a month but if you get accepted to their program, it brings it down to $50 a month for a year.
No project management tools? Slack, Trello?
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.