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Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?

63 points by drlaj ↗ HN
I've recently started working on a side project with a couple of friends, nothing crazy, but we're already spending over $200 a month on supporting services. It's nothing to write home about (yet!) but it was a little surprising.

For those of you who have side projects (or a startup for that matter) and don't mind sharing, how many services are you using and what's your total monthly SaaS spend?

Cheers Luke

57 comments

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patio11
I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it.

Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc.

The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap, at $0.60 per month [+]. (Colin, get on the gravy train, you're welcome it it.)

SaaS is a very small portion of my businesses' total expenses. I spend more on hosting and telecomm (largely due to the line of business which is, well, an international telecomm). People are also much more expensive then software, even to the limited extent at which I hire people.

[+] It turns out that a) this had creeped up to $3 per month and b) my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now. grumble grumble picodollars grumble grumble Would happily pay $100 a month to not feel what I'm feeling right now. grumble grumble

phpnode
I also spent around 50 cents / month on tarsnap, at this rate my account credit will last another 7.5 years! Colin your service is great, I would pay orders of magnitude more for it, please increase your price so that I don't have to worry about it going away!
pdb123
I just checked out tarsnap. It's $0.30/gb/month. I currently do a backup to S3 which is a fraction of the price. I wouldn't mind having another cloud service. Why did you choose tarsnap if it's so expensive.
patio11
Many of us are using Tarsnap for actual businesses, where it is criminally underpriced. Among the many reasons to use it over backing up to S3 is that Tarsnap backups are encrypted and the service is written by a domain-expert in that field. Among many other possible scenarios, I use Tarsnap to back up the MySQL and Redis dumps for Appointment Reminder. These include some data which is covered by BAAs which bind me to restrictions on privacy and security under the HIPAA legislation. Just scp'ing them into S3 would be an automatic compliance failure, where I'd pay $600k or so of fines to save $2 a month on Tarsnap.
phpnode
At $0.5/month it's pretty cheap in fact. But while the price per picobyte might be higher than AWS, I feel a lot more comfortable using something that has been purpose built for the task by a legitimate genius. The whole point of backup is to be able to sleep at night, I don't want to cut costs here.
xgarland
Who are you currently for your telecom services? I'm always surprised about the amount of money businesses spend on their phone system.
iSloth
Don't forget one of Patio11's products is almost entirely leveraging telecom services for it's functionality: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/

So I doubt he is just talking about a generic office phone when mentioning teleco services.

patio11
Mostly it's Twilio costs. I spend an unconscionable amount on my cell phone bill due to e.g. international roaming or international phone calls for sales/support, but that doesn't even crater the approach to the bridge of what Twilio costs me. (And I rush to say "I'm totally fine with that, and wish I spent 100X as much, because to a first approximation that would imply revenues 100X higher than they are currently.")
cperciva
my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now

You would have received an email when your account balance hit 7 days worth of storage costs. And another when it hit zero. And another 7+ days later.

But if you're saying I should have a mechanism for automatically re-billing credit cards when a Tarsnap account balance gets low -- yes, that's on my to-do list.

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hectormalot
Side project: an automatic roster for evening and weekend emergency duties for groups of dentists. We run on Heroku and most of our saas cost is a dyno ($35), an SSL add-on ($20), and some phone/sms cost from Twilio ($5-10). We use workless to spin up and down a worker dyno when needed.

Since the tool supports an offline process we don't have incredible loads, so we use the free tier of most other services (e.g. SendGrid, etc.)

What are you spending your $200 on?

CoachRufus87
how reliable has workless been for you?
hectormalot
Has worked pretty good since initial configuration. Only hick up I've had was after a password reset at Heroku, which disabled the ability for workless to start the worker (and failed silently at the time...)
drlaj
We are using:

Windows Azure Google Apps GitHub Dropbox Evernote

leoplct
0$
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blakesterz
These things add up so fast don't they? I think I'm around $200, which is down quite a bit. We had to get rid of New Relic, which broke my heart because it's awesome, and several other things to cut costs. It's all the little things that add up like LastPass, Dropbox, backup space, mail and so on. Sometime the FOSS alternatives aren't worth it, sometimes they are.
avanderhoorn
Main work project: Around $500 a month split across 2 services - Mixpanel ($350) and Azure Hosting ($150). Its a 2 man team

Side projects: Around $40 a month split across 2 services - Gtihub, Asana

greg5green
I'm around $10/month but I've yet to build anything that anyone has taken a shine to (besides myself of course).
Brajeshwar
Honestly, I believe the pricing model deployed by most Sass product is broken. I know they do experiment and that best clients are the ones willing to pay a premium, and that they are indeed the ones to be taken care of.

However, does it not look more like, get the most from the few?

I don't run or own any Sass Products, so I may be utterly wrong, but won't it not be that there is a gradual increase in price along with multiple options instead of the typical (i) free for the not-so-usable one instance (ii) ~$20 for barely yourself (iii) ~100 for cool and hip but (iv) we're keeping the best for the last at ~$500 (v) of course, the mega corps can email us for to talk about their 10,000th employee.

What about a dynamic pricing where I'm not fleeced at $19 per user per month but more of - it starts with $19 but then to support the next user is rather simple and cost-effective, let is be just $4.99?

As I said, just my thought, I'm yet to experiment with pricing and see them for myself.

As for the questions, I run few side projects and a UI/UX Consulting Service and I'm within $100 per month - from invoicing, to hosting to project management to version control.

einhverfr
That's actually what we do with CloudLedger Basic from Efficito.[1]

$7.50/month for your first user. $2.50/month for your second user. In theory you could, if you talk with us, maybe go up to 6-7 users, but really at that rate you are likely to be better off going with our premium service of $30/month which gets you a VM of specific capacity aimed at around 10 simultaneous users (that also comes with it the chance of customization and integration with your business network). That service can scale up and out as needed but with additional cost.

The major differences between the basic and plus offering is that since you get a full VM with the plus offering, you can get direct access tot he database, integrate with your network via VPN, or re-use your LDAP or Active Directory services for single sign-on. Additionally it is possible to customize the offering in ways that are not possible in the less expensive, multi-tenant offering.

We actually thought through that issue. I will admit our site isn't nearly perfect yet but hey we're two geeks trying to make a go of it without as much time or resources as we would like.

[1] http://www.efficito.com

cm2012
Spent $15000 a year at my old job (mostly on channeladvisor)
jdlshore
For http://letscodejavascript.com, I spend about $1000 per month on various services. The biggest expenses go to PayPal, credit card processors, and Recurly, which all charge a percentage of revenue. Other than that, it's SendFaster, which hosts my videos ($200); Heroku, which hosts the site ($66); and Pingdom, which monitors my sites for uptime ($9). I also spend a small amount each year for TypeKit (fonts).

Edit: I should add that Let's Code JavaScript isn't a side project; it's my primary revenue stream.

andregoiano
Around 300USD/month on close to 15 services.
joemaller1
Small, conservative design shop, SaaS is about $60-80 per seat per month, varying by role. The bulk of that is Creative Cloud, which is at least twice as expensive as it should be.
iSloth
Two servers from OVH is my only expense for side projects, total is around $30/pm

Using quite a few free services like Pingdom, Cloudflare, Analytics etc...

revelation
That would be IaaS. It's probably too late now, but it would have been interesting had this asked about IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
kybernetyk
Till the whole NSA thing came out I was spending around $200-$300 for several services. After that I switched to a local server and FOSS alternatives to Dropbox, Github & co.

Now my SaaS spending is $0 or $10 depending on if you count Spotify as SaaS.

eswat
Looking at my Expenses Table[1] I am spending about $16.52 a week on SaaS: GitHub, Creative Cloud, IRCCloud, Private Internet Access and Last.fm. In a few weeks I’ll be adding FreshBooks to this table. I don’t host any demanding side projects - really just anything that can be hosted on GitHub Pages - so most of my expenses are to facilitate my design consultancy.

http://eswat.ca/expenses/

sanat
Around $250 on 5 services - Heroku, WPEngine, Beanstalkapp, Bitbucket, and AWS.
gamegoblin 

  Digital Ocean $15
  Netflix       $10
  Spotify       $10
  Domain Names  $5  (yearly/12)
  --------------------
  Total         $40
kruk
We use Github ($25), Google Apps ($20), Pivotal Tracker ($7) and Enterprise Chef (within free tier). So in total $52.
canterburry
Our Saas, Pixtulate, is currently in beta and bootstrapped. We have optimized for lowest cost possible at the moment and our traffic is still fairly low.

  1. DigitalOcean - $110/month
  2. Google Apps - $5/month
  3. UptimeRobot - Free (just as good as Pingdom)
  4. CloudFlare - Free (serving under 2 TB/month)
  6. Amazon S3 - $1.40/month
  7. MixPanel - Free
  8. HeapAnalytics - Free
  9. Google Analytics - Free
  10. BaseCRM - Free
  11. MailChimp - Free
  12. Mandrill - Free
  13. Tumblr - Free (our blog)
  14. CloudBees - Free (build, maven repos etc)
  15. Desk.com - $3/month
  16. NewRelic - Free (server monitoring)
  17. GoDaddy - $9/year
I am absolutely amazed over how many services we can get free. On one hand, we would either have to invest more into development or do without, on the other, it doesn't bode well for our own likelihood of making money.
wj
Thanks for the tip on UptimeRobot!
_delirium
None so far I think. I could be missing something, but looking briefly at what I spend money on, I don't think any of it counts as SaaS.

I do spend money on various IaaS offerings. But none of the services on top of that have come up so far as something I feel I need. But I'm doing mostly research (which is also my job) and side projects, not running a tech business. I need servers, not so much services. There are some vaguely relevant services (like machine-learning-as-a-service), but I generally don't feel comfortable being dependent on an external service for my actual research. So I'd only use these if it was an ancillary need and not something where I might need to publish the results. There's also a move towards asking researchers to ship VMs of their test setup as a replicable archive of the work, and dependencies on external services are a no-go for that.

For my personal life, Dropbox is the closest I came to paying for. But then I realized I was mostly just using it to back up photos, which seemed like a use-case it's not even designed for. So I moved those to a local backup + Flickr.

rtfeldman
I have a side project where we spend about $150/month on Amazon Web Services for hosting and $50 on one other SaaS service needed by the product.

Take that with the grain of salt that our total marketing spend is $0. We don't even use Mixpanel or any equivalent to track what our users are doing.

Achshar
I bought a windows 8 licence, but that has no expiration date so I don't think it can be converted into a per month rate. Other than that I have a domain which is hosted for $20 annually. So while server software and domain can probably count as Saas but the (part of the (VPS)) server itself cannot be saas I guess. That's pretty much it.
ithinkso
How are you guys managing tens of SaaS? Isn't it a problem to remember, configure, update etc?