Which SaaS do you pay for as an Indie Hacker?
I try to stay as lean as possible, not paying for any SaaS to keep my costs low.
Every dollar counts when we're building and growing our businesses. One strategy to keep costs in check is to minimize or eliminate payments for SaaS tools. However, it's essential to strike a balance between cutting costs and investing in tools that can genuinely boost our productivity and success.
So, I'm curious: How many of you pay for SaaS tools? And if you do, which ones have you found valuable enough to invest in? Conversely, if you're currently holding back due to limited resources, which SaaS tools would you be willing to pay for if you had more financial flexibility?aas? Which ones do you pay for? Which ones would you be willing to pay for if you had more resources?
I'll kick things off by sharing my perspective. Personally, I've taken a bootstrapping approach and avoided paying for most SaaS tools. I'm only momentarily paying for Framer while I build my landing page and I'm paying Vercel's starter plan.
I totally feel this. I want to pay as little money as possible. My current stack is:
I was able to build my first startup for less than $30/month this way.
can you explain the AWS part, what were you using it for?
For sure, I wrote a blog post that goes into more detail of which AWS services I used and how much they each cost: https://www.lydiaoncybersecurity.com/launching-isthisphishy/
similar :)
Love the frugal approach :)
I spend about 500/month on Saas products:
As an agency owner I need subscriptions of tools for making:
client proposals(tried using panda doc)
invoices(tried using Zoho invoices but it does not integrate esign, for which you’ve to use zohosign)
managing projects(tried Trello and jira, currently using jira)
clients, finances of the projects(excel)
my team, and more.
Is there a tool that combines all of these at a single place ?
No idea, but that's a nice SaaS idea - reach out to me, would love to chat and build it
Thought https://kitchen.co/ have solved this problem.
Have you tried it, is there anything missing out?
Yeah sure let’s connect. I’m already working on a product, maybe we can discuss.
For Repo Lookout I use..
Good question! It’s interesting to see what others pay for.
I am not a developer, so I no-code my products using Bubble.
So my suite of SaaS is:
That’s it! Rest is free for now:
Love it, nice and cheap stack :)
Currently paying for a few things that are starting to eat into profits. Intercom being the most expensive and the one I’m actively trying to replace with a self hosted FOSS.
Let me know if anyone has a recommendation. Thinking about multiple service to equal intercom’s
Intercom is way too expensive :(
If you only need the chat function, Chatwoot works pretty great. You can self-host it or you can use their free tier which is pretty nice.
That’s exactly what I’m looking at now. I think that paired with posthog and signoz will cover everything I need for about 1/10 the cost of intercom alone.
Bro thank you so much 🙏
I'm creating a GPT website chatbot (but built for conversions, not support) and Intercom is a competitor I'm trying to steal customers from.
I'm going to use your comment and run some ads saying something like "Intercom eating into your profits?"
I love how forums are the best place to find great copy.
Hahahah, happy to help!
We at www.tidyrise.com spend on only following services that are critical and their free tiers can not be used for prod.
Rest all are free tiers
I am a Solo entrepreneur and don't pay any of the SaaS tools except the servers and CDN.
Most SaaA tools have a free tire that becomes too limited as soon as there is 2 or more people in the team.
I am developer myself. Hence with my past experience, I am also able to make use of open source projects.
For example I use Mautic for email campaign and use WordPress to build a FAQ support site.
Have built my own ticking form that also sends confirmation email about ticket being raised. It's easy to build.
That's a great skill to have, or skills all together. Though, older generation of business owners, or people who do not possess time or knowledge on the subject, may want to ask for help from SaaS companies. I am a founder of a SaaS sort of business, I do the whole thing myself, from designing and developing websites to creating small designs. From my experience whilst browsing on the endless web, often I notice established businesses that have a weird website. It's mostly never about the colors or font choice, but way more in depths. The structure - probably the most important variable, without which, the visitor might forget why they even got on that specific website.
There are many possible structure plans for a website, often they are tailored to the market the business operates with, but one thing they all have in common is the very first element when a visitor lands on the home page. Most "do-it-yourself business owners" tend to become poetics and try to reinvent the wheel, overloading the very first element by adding some useless text. If you have a roofing business, per example, you might want to have a big heading which mentions the fact that the visitor has landed on a site of a roof changing company. Then, small text underneath might say something that compliments the big text. If you provide some insane speed roof replacement, then mention that. It should captivate the visitor's attention and intrigue him into viewing the following content.
It's those little things people don't know about that keep the sales low. There's a reason web-dev companies exist. They really do help raise the conversion rates, because often there's a whole team of creative brains behind the whole thing. How much do you think a proper website is worth to your business?
It's really worth it. I also believe that the worthy website cannot be done at one shot.
It takes lot many iterations even when done with experts and creative minds.
Fully indeed!
For my startup https://www.withbilly.com/ I'm only paying for Vercel and Firebase. I have built many side projects before and I keep coming back to Firebase all the time. It's reliable and super cheap :-)
I've never been able to use Firebase right :(
But I'm using Pocketbase with free hosting on fly.dev and it has worked great
Everything else is fully bootstrapped and cost at a minimum.
Was thinking to go paid for Plausible Analytics, but then decided to host myself for free. Will change this as soon as there is more traffic incoming.
Hadn't heard of Plausible Analytics - you've given me a new SaaS to add to my wishlist when I start generating more revenue
ahrefs
cushion
useFathom
typefully
Hadn't heard of a couple of these SaaS, will check them out!
I should try and make a complete list of everything. These are just a few of the ones I spend a lot of time in. XD
Still on the free tiers of those:
I use GCP to run all the infra and that's the main expense :)
Great question! For the development of our macOS Pomodoro timer Lifeline, we pay for the following SaaS tools:
Userlist $75 p/m (for automated product education email sequences)
Notion $10 p/m (company OS and knowledge base for users)
Google $5 p/m (for email)
Webflow $23 p/m (for the website + blog)
I'd say the email one is the most painful (especially since it will go up to $150 p/m by the end of the year when we exit their startup discount program), but we do see much higher retention from people who get the emails during onboarding, trial, etc., and I would have no idea how to build something like that ourselves.
Perplexity AI: $20/month - Research & content generation
Stealthgpt: $5/month - Making generated content bypass AI detection
Blackmagic (Professional): $22/month - Twitter Analytics
Notion.so (Plus): $8/month - Business OS
Thanks for sharing this list. Would love to hear more about how you use Perplexity AI for content generation.
Do you mean that you use it to find relevant information, which you then use in your content? Or do you actually use it to generate content?
Happy to share more. I mostly use it to find relevant information AI is great at querying and extracting information. But at times when I have the content headers and a bit of description in mind I use AI to create the original draft.
And how is Perplexity AI different in that regard from ChatGPT (Plus)?
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