Which SaaS products should have a cheaper alternatives?
There are many SaaS products available in the market. According to you, which SaaS products you think should have a cheaper alternatives?
Note - this original post is from late 2018, but it makes sense to have a more up-to-date version - https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-which-saas-products-should-have-a-cheaper-alternative-0c068b1617?commentId=-LUrb1J8kSoQ8k5aLogU
Typeform, while beautiful, seems unnecessarily expensive unless you're using all the advanced features.
And I think you can take typeform in many different directions and niche down:
If I did not have an idea for a side project, I would literally start hunting down people who use typeform, find some common thread of how they use it and create a cheaper alternative that focuses more on ONE problem out of 100 that typeform can solve.
Yes please!
Eventbrite. All these ticketing services are way too expensive. 1.5 dollars per ticket? That's insane!
Hey, as Tom mentions I run Ticket Tailor, launched for exactly the reason you mention. Just $0.65 / ticket and gets cheaper with monthly plans. Also, currently completely free for online events - https://www.tickettailor.com/eventbrite-alternative/
@jonnywhite runs a competitor here: https://tickettailor.com/
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
The two products that stand out to me as needing a cheaper alternative, but I haven't found one yet.
Intercom - particularly at scale (i..e 20K, 50K, 100K, 1mm MAUs).
Dropbox - For what the product is/does, it's way too expensive.
Hello, in my project we also believe that it is possible to make a good product of this type (Intercom) with a lower price. Take a look: https://froged.com
Crisp is a solid cheaper alternative to Intercom.
It's honestly not much cheaper, unless you go Pro Intercom w/ all the bells and whistles. Intercom essentials is like $120/mo, vs Crisp $99.
I was very close to pulling the trigger on moving to HelpScout as the pricing model is perfect for small teams, but they don't even have a 'user events' API, which is pretty basic/critical for triggering lifecycle emails in my opinion.
I tried both. At scale, Crisp is much cheaper. And you can get most of important features of Crisp for $25/month, unlimited users.
I actually just cancelled Dropbox outright. Now that I barely deal with files. It's not really worth it.
I also cancelled recently
I am now using Mega
Quite happy with it
Have you tried Mega as an alternative to Dropbox ?
For intercom try tawk.to
I'm actually building a simpler, more affordable, and more privacy-friendly Intercom. It's targeted towards smaller companies like solo founders, bootstrapped startups, and early-stage companies.
It's here if you'd like to check it out: https://letterbase.io
Happy to answer any questions you or anyone else might have.
I'm curious, what privacy concerns do you have with Intercom?
I don't mean to pick on Intercom specifically. It's an industry-wide practice for customer support tools to collect as much user information as possible, to ostensibly help companies provide better customer support.
In my opinion, it invades every user's privacy without actually moving the needle on the few customers who do actually need support.
Here's a few examples just off the top of my head of how certain customer support tools invade your privacy:
In contrast, Letterbase does none of this extraneous stuff. No recording keystrokes, no using your IP address to get more information about you, no creepy live view of what your visitors are seeing. It's a pure, privacy-first messenger.
I am currently thinking of an open source, self-hosted in-site chat, like Intercom. Of course Intercom is a lot more than chat, but being self-hosted I could allow deeper integrations more easily. And you always have full access to the data.
Which open source tool are you considering? I did fail to mention one point. While I have found many suitable replacements for Intercom on web (on cheaper side), where it gets tough is on Mobile. Many providers don't have native SDKS to allow a similar style chat from mobile/native.
I meant I would be building one. What alternatives have you tried?
I can work on native SDKs if the product picks up and I get enough customers.
Oh goodness! that would be quite the endeavor. A lot of hard work. What would be your motivation to build an open source version? I've tried ZenDesk Chat, Drift, and FreshChat for web.
Nice you put it that way. No the endeavor is not an issue for me**.
I am curious about technology that has demand but does not have multiple alternatives. I am already into a product, so I am mainly looking at Chat and other ideas for weekend hacks, launch them, then proceed only if there is big customer demand.
**14 years professional software engineer with decent money and mental peace to stick to something for next 12-18 months.
That's very admirable. Happy to provide additional feedback/insight as you work through the app. There is another indiehacker member working on a similar product. They seem like a pretty young startup > https://letterbase.io/
Thank you. I am a trying entrepreneur, I guess. That is nice. I am sure I have come across Letterbase, perhaps from IH itself. What do you build though?
Yes, the LetterBase person is on IH. I'm currently experimenting with developer related tools. I haven't decided the exact direction, but I have a few pretty good ideas that I like -- but for the moment, I'm just experimenting mostly. React, React Native, NodeJS, Next.js, Postgres, TimescaleDB, Golang are my primary tools.
Nice! My toolkit has Python (and all it's friends) in the backend instead of Node. Rest are similar. Picking up Rust.
You can say all SaaS products can have a cheaper alternative. Question is, should it be cheaper or better? Some makers are falling into the trap of offering product way to cheap. Just something worth keeping in mind.
ConvertKit, starting at 29/month for 1000 subscribers is overly expensive
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Medium needs to be redone IMO.
Think the initial idea was great, and more recently it is overextended and counter intuitive.
I'm building imprint.to to bring back what Medium was about in the beginning!
This looks really nice!
Thanks for sharing this! Where is the setting page for setting up my domain etc.?
My Blogs > Create a new blog if you haven't > Settings wheel > Add custom domain if you want
Ah. I meant having my own domain. blog.mydigitaloffice.io or mydigitaloffice.io/blog. We are using another IndieHackers solution right now. Not sure if the guy is still around or even working on it. But it does let us do that.
Yup! You can set up blog.mydigitaloffice.io with Imprint for free. Just need to configure your domain's CNAME accordingly, and set your domain on your Imprint blog's settings page. If you need any help, feel free to reach out at hello@imprint.to :)
Thanks. This makes sense now. Just point my cname to that blog custom domain.
Maybe a more managed Ghost. After all the reason Medium reached so many bloggers because it's super simple to get up and running. On the downside of not having your content under your domain and no SEO benefit. I fear Substack might be going the direction of Medium.
Substack is decent
As much as i love it. Canny
How about upvoty.com ?
We use Conflux
Check out kampsite.co also
Check out Upvoty.com 🙌
https://minimaps.io/ is a free alternative, if you need just the basics
This comment was deleted 2 years ago
Obviously Intercom.
Here is why?
We were using Intercom for our customer-facing team and using there every feature and the pricing then was on per team member we add. We were getting around $400-$500 per month.
And then one day we got an email from their team mentioning that they are going to increase their pricing and when I calculate the pricing it was costing us around $1500 which was 3x then what we were paying to them.
Obviously, we started looking for an alternative and have tried couple of other platforms and I must say there is no perfect competitor available who can compete with Intercom. They are a leader in their space.
We've used it for 2 years consistently every day (even on weekends) and I must admit that Intercom is the best and I strongly believe they need a tuff competition.
Mixpanel or Amplitude should have both cheaper and easier to understand alternatives.
I enjoy what PostHog is working on.
Alternatives for sending transactional emails that land in users inbox:
Mailgun alternative
Sendgrid alternative
Start price at $5 p/mo
Perhaps I'm missing something, but at $1 per 1000 emails it's about 10 times the price of Amazon SES?
Btw are you saying I should charge 10 CENTS per 1000 emails? Is this the pricing your customers can expect at EmailOctopus? What’s the point of your comment
Price isn't everything, of course, but the thread was about cheaper alternatives to the larger competitors. I asked if I was missing something because a platform which costs 10x the cost of one of its largest competitors is quite clearly not cheaper.
Amazon SES are not a competitor for us at EmailOctopus, so it's an irrelevant comparison.
And whilst I'm not here on this thread self-promoting EmailOctopus as a cheaper alternative, you are of course welcome to compare our pricing to our larger competitors such as Mailchimp, Mailerlite or Get Response.
Also do you expect me to charge 10 CENTS? Do you expect that? Why else make that comparison
I think if you're positioning yourself as the cheapest in the market, then yes you'll need to charge around $0.10 per email.
All depends on what product positioning strategy you're going for, right?
Where did I mention cheapest? Or does OP mentioned cheapest? Do you have reading problems?
See my other post.
Anyhow, I sense you're a little bit precious about this, honestly no offence meant.
Okay, so being an cheaper alternative to Sendgrid and Mailgun was not enough for you, you had to list Amazon and make it a way as if “you do understand what it’s about”, do you this with every niche or topic here on IH?
It’s not about price and yet you compare price ... 🤦♂️
It's all about product positioning, right? If you position your product as a cheaper alternative to mainstream products, then it needs to be one of the cheapest mainstream products.
I don't comment on everything but email I obviously know most about, both transactional and marketing, so keen to assist people in the niche where I can as it's a great place to grow a business.
The topic does NOT say cheapest, it says “cheaper”
And if you read my post you'll see I said: "If you position your product as a cheaper alternative to mainstream products".
No offence was meant, purely guidance. But I'll leave you to running your business and hope it's a success.
Edit: Moved post under correct thread (hence deletion below)
And yes my product is cheaper for most users that can afford $5 but can not afford $35
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I guess you’re so cheap that even $5 is too expensive for you, you want to pay pennies
Navinp I'm sorry if you found this post offensive.
Please let's not detract into personal insults and try to keep it cordial and professional.
Intercom is way too expensive for bootstrapped businesses. It easily scales up to $1500/month.
Yes that’s why I didn’t mention Amazon as alternative, can’t compete with billionaire Jeff Bezos