
A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools - ksj2114
https://acrossapp.com/blog/how-a-2-person-startup-already-uses-28-other-tools
======
Hnrobert42
I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance
between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get
too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy.

E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a
bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity
(every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin
plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad.
rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO’s insistence that we switch to a
different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later,
sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone
because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget
solution.

Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us
to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected
NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the
roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won’t
give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other’s salaries.

We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built
some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday,
salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going
forward with the departed colleague’s plan to move all our infrastructure to
DO.

So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT
department is so behind the times and won’t let you use Postgres instead of
MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because
no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are
like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some
other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the
middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.

(All that said, my job isn’t bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than
most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my
job is to wrangle it.)

~~~
calmworm
Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level
software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need.

NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very
similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into
using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at
something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself. 6 months later,
it was still not functional.

I got pulled onto the team to help. We made _some_ progress and I hired and
managed 4 remote programmers to write all the plugins and customizations we
would need to make it work with our model (multi-channel e-commerce, multiple
warehouses/locations). It was a nightmare all-around and completely
unnecessary. PM/VP left the company because he couldn't do the job and we were
stuck with a half-assed implementation at that point.

It's been around 4 years since the first day, I am no longer with that
company, and I am sure they are still struggling with NS and employing
multiple developers to keep things going. Good for the devs, bad for biz. I am
willing to bet it's never returned a single dollar on the investment and cost
them far more than they wanted to spend. If you can't see the light at the end
of the tunnel at this point, cut your loses, and don't get another "solution-
in-a-box".

~~~
wpietri
Weirdly, almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat next to somebody at a wedding who
had an almost-identical story about cleaning up after an SAP rollout, but all
of the numbers had an extra zero or two. It amazes me that what the SaaS shift
appears to have achieved is that now much smaller companies can get stuck in
the same "solve everything" money pit.

But I guess the fundamental problem hasn't changed: executives want to believe
in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the
actual work. With no regard for actual operational efficiency, and no need to
hold themselves to the ROI standards they'd demand of others.

~~~
zbentley
> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the
> feelings of control with none of the actual work

Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve
all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up
than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a
week or two, promise.

As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie
somewhere in the middle.

~~~
abakker
I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building
tools in bad faith to consume money. It’s just that in the end, “solve
everything” means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual
features that companies all have in common.

~~~
com
That works both ways. 70% of features are common with other businesses, but
the feature set is pretty diverse. My experience is that internal folk with a
good understanding of the business hit 90-95% of the requirements without
implementing the 200% of non-relevant broader industry requirements. YMMV.

------
matsemann
Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just
burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt.

For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other
startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products
mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years
back they were small and only used by other small startups.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I used to think this every time I downloaded a free mobile game. Probably 90%+
of ads in mobile games were for other free mobile games that presumably also
have the same ad-supported model and the same sort of advertisers. It feels
like there's a few games making heaps from IAPs and everyone else is just
advertising in a pyramid toward them while also using IAPs in a way that makes
their own game basically unplayable.

~~~
knolax
Similarly, web comic ads seem to consist entirely of ads for other web comics.

~~~
asdff
This one isn't so bad. You like web comics, you probably would like other web
comics.

What is boneheaded is advertising shovels to me because I was tracked while
buying another shovel online. I already have my damn shovel for the next 50
years I do not care anymore at all about shovels. Now if I were served a
wheelbarrow ad...

------
bad_user
IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't
worth it in a small startup:

1\. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email
and Skype

2\. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app
— just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder

3\. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high
volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the
initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment

4\. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the
Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account
has been more than enough

5\. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot
($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and
evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they
don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription

6\. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen
instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are
tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to
evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or
paper, then get rid of it

~~~
krilly
Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's
literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact
that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

~~~
teach
Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

~~~
tomaskafka
This. For any serious discussion you need to have topics and async slow-motion
discussions for them. Like forums.

Slack should definitely add a 'forum-like' kind of channel before someone
creates a new 'forums with native client' product.

------
edanm
You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking
water. Plates for eating.

This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow
fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It
makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality,
if you think of _all_ inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

~~~
crubier
True but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs. You do pay rent, but in
many case the sum of SaaS subscription is in the same order of magnitude as
the rent.

~~~
apk-d
Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of
subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers
here tend to earn roughly the same _number_ , but in a different _currency_ ,
which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This
results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We
use Discord for communication, Gitlab for source control, vscode for writing
code, and... honestly, what else do you even need to run a software company
anyway?

At my last startup, the total monthly subscription cost was the $1 Bitwarden
tier (granted, we were tiny). And yes, a Ryzen system bolted to a $10 lackrack
was entirely sufficient for our hosting needs.

~~~
omnimus
Lackrack is magnificent. First time i am seeing this.

~~~
gumby
Look at the history of google. Enclosures made of LEGO, and just laying
motherboards on sheets of cardboard in shelves rather than buying “server
pc”s. This kind of attitude plus the quality of their search, was what got
them enthusiastically funded before they had any idea of revenue.

(They took so long to figure out the revenue model that they almost had the
money taken back by the VCs, and had a CEO thrust upon them)

------
davidjgraph
From the other side (vendor perspective) we see this SaaS fatigue a lot.

We have a free, open source, unlimited use product that has a very good,
commercial, alternative. What we hear in calls is that there are just too many
SaaS tools in the company and the monthly cost (or security review of all
tools) ends up with the management saying "pick your top 5,10,15 most
important" and drop the rest.

The GSuites, Slacks, AWS, Notions, Zooms, etc (picking from the article list)
get in the top priority list and that list is so full the medium priority
stuff just gets crossed out and pushed down to budgets lower down. Our
category just rarely makes it.

A lot of the time we win out just because the company wants to avoid the admin
of the paid solution, the tool just isn't _that_ important. Being creative in
your business model, I think, is the way to go, particularly in terms of
freemium offerings.

With the number of SaaS apps trying to get your monthly cost, being outside
the core list is getting harder and harder and you need to define those niches
and totally own them. Forget starting at the company level, start with 1-5
people groups for a _long_ time.

~~~
ska
As an aside, draw.io (now diagrams.net I see, why the change?) is a nice tight
project.

I was an early adopter (i.e. from beta releases) of lucidchart and really
liked their first few years; convinced two companies to get a bunch of
licenses. Over time they've become a hot mess of bad patterns in SAAS and I
won't touch them for a few years now (and let a license for ~100 people
expire).

Congrats on keeping things simple and not making it harder to use over time.

~~~
Macha
The popup on the page links to an article that explains why:
[https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-
net](https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-net)

Basically they're dropping the .io domain for security and ethical concerns,
and the old name being the full domain is probably why that leads to a full
rebrand

~~~
ska
Makes sense, I missed that link somehow.

------
wenbin
A one-person startup uses not less than yours :)
[https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-
behin...](https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-
person-23/)

It's a good thing that we can outsource tasks to 3rd party SaaS for a small
fee, rather than hiring full-time employees

~~~
wolco
Thanks for providing that link. It's not very often I would come back to a
thread just to comment on a website. The vast amount of content available
quickly is impressive.

The tagline is podcast searching like google. How do you keep discovering new
content like google, are you running your own crawler?

------
siftrics
It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use.

I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless
([https://usegripeless.com](https://usegripeless.com)). If you look at the
Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the
internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I
don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptical
too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration
took less than 10 minutes.

Turns out it’s more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately
caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop
here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs
we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure
even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who
submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and
asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively
onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue
to drive much more revenue than it costs.

That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on
additional tools. I’m not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more
opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don’t work.

~~~
vasco
Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free
plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.

~~~
rsify
I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about
broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on
the _negative_ feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction-
less as possible for the end user to submit.

HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both
positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your
product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but
it does come with some caveats.

Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd
_explicitly_ pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and
submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state
that they're dissatisfied.

Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single
text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out
their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - since
complaints are very clearly solicited.

Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and
competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as
an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just
yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0),
but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs,
something that a larger company can't offer at scale.

Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns
via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at maciej@usegripeless.com

\- Maciej

~~~
teach
I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your
reasoning.

We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very
very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text
field AFTER the happiness slider.

We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a
ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.

------
moksly
I’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials
plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also
cheaper.

I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s
really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the
options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it.

I think if you got the full teams/one-note experience on the essential plan
that it might be better, but you don’t get the full experience in the browser.
One example is that you can use Excel inside Onenote in the browser. But since
I don’t really like slack or the g-suite stuff either, it’s basically the same
with less hassle.

~~~
hliyan
A counterpoint (also based on personal experience): recently moved from a
company that uses Office365 to a one that uses GSuite. Communications and
document sharing feels far more simpler and productive. I can't quite put my
finger on why, but working on GSuite just feels faster and less clunkier.

~~~
sircastor
I share this experience. My company switched to Office365 from GSuite. It
feels universally like a step down. The workers who all used MS desktop
products liked it, but everyone I work with it had expressed nothing but
disdain.

~~~
b0ner_t0ner
We are using Office 365. Outlook's search, spam management and filtering tools
are very poor compared to Gmail.

------
Jare
I believe the attention cost of using and keeping up with so many great tools
is underappreciated. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather use Github Projects
than Trello not because GHP is better (it is not) but because I'm already
using Github, and the mental and workflow cost of adding Trello to the mix is
(I feel) higher than its additional value.

Notion in particular drives me nuts. I mean it's very very well done, but you
use it to create a hierarchy of collaborative documents... because apparently
GSuite docs are not good enough? Notion I think is a case of local maxima,
because Gdocs/Office365 offer so many more ways to keep documentation and data
in better formats (doc, sheet, slides...).

Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of a thousand good things. :)

~~~
nojvek
Agreed. Notion feels quite a bit complex. May be I just don’t understand it
yet. I understand AirTable’s value prop. It’s pretty straightforward.

------
tinza123
IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible,
because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing
in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really
very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours
on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets
funded and has more resources.

~~~
erikpukinskis
On the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table,
react-dates, and react-select.

If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been
fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look.
And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a
constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function.

It would have been way faster to start from scratch, in my opinion. This has
all been over 6 months, so it's not like there was some initial payoff period
either.

~~~
danielvinson
As a frontend dev, this really pains me. I’ve worked at many places with the
same problems - first of all, pushing back on the designer is incredibly
important if something is hard to develop. Most designers are doing their best
to make things easy to code, but aren’t developers, so they just don’t know.
It’s the engineers job to tell them no when things are exceptionally
difficult. If they understand that the style change they want is a 3 month
project, maybe they would be happy to design something different.

Secondly, frontend is hard. Having a senior react dev who can accurately weigh
the trade offs of using external components like that would have been
invaluable here. People underestimate how much different in skill level a
junior react/frontend dev is from a senior engineer with experience in
multiple frameworks. 6 months is long time in terms of dev hours - writing a
table from scratch for your use case that works with design is usually a 1-2
sprint task, and that’s absolutely the hardest one there. But more reasonably,
work should have been done to make a reusable style library to make this even
easier.

~~~
nojvek
Writing data tables isn’t easy. Deffo not a 1-2 week thing and you call it
done. The trail of bug fixes and browser edge cases are what slowly get you at
the end.

+1 on not letting design dictate. Just gotta sit in the room and weigh pros
and cons.

~~~
danielvinson
1-2 sprints, which for most teams is 4-6 weeks. It really depends on use
cases... generally startups don't have any need to support old browsers and
can enforce current Chrome+Firefox only.

------
DocG
Company I work for has grown to 10 people and the pricing per member things
are getting out of hand. We had to drop some services, bc if there is a
service that costs 10 per user for just one feature, it's they add up real
quick (looking at you slack for example).

Some services have free tier or special pricing if it's only couple of
members, but once you exhaust that, you are dropped to full pricing. I think
there is a opportunity for different pricing for growing companies between
5-25 people.

It seems that this pay per member works for small companies, couple of people
or huge ones. But if you are growing with limited revenue the costs are way
too high while you are still also finding your market.

~~~
watt
No reason to look at Slack like that. It may be well worth the price.

When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication
system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete
Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email.

It's pretty big deal. And that's why they can charge that level of
subscription.

~~~
gibolt
Compared to a salary, it is nothing. If your company functions and people are
more productive because of it, ~$80 a year is nothing.

~~~
hedora
I’d be more productive without slack.

It’s useful for distributed teams, and for incident response, but basic
messaging + jira/github + zoom cover those use cases better.

Slack was OK before the bot stuff and integration with ldap/email groups
landed. Now, it’s at least as spammy as email, except not searchable, the (non
customizable) UI is worse, and the social norm is that you spend 100% of the
day checking a firehose of broadcast messages and machine generated spam (in
some teams, even after working hours).

------
arminiusreturns
I have concluded that existing businesses and other certain factors limit the
application of what I am about to say to a subset, but there is great room for
a holistic "here is your IT stack" company that focuses on open source
tooling, reduction of stack complexity, and working out many of the oft-
repeated learning curves.

It's a huge market opportunity waiting to happen, because death or at least
injury by a thousand licensing fee cuts is real. Small startups, small
businesses looking to modernize, non-profits, etc would all be potential
customers, and unlike the coast-centric viewpoint of HN, those tend to
actually be the vast majority of companies in middle America.

Many MSP's and various resellers and salesmen make a living off trapping these
in lock-in also. I have seen all of this over many years first hand. There is
a reason Spiceworks took off so fast. There is also a reason they are
hemorrhaging customers... because Spiceworks entire model was built around
advertising lock-in type products to customers. (also their tooling sorta
sucks, despite being easy and having a decent web front-end)

~~~
lonelappde
Isn't that what MS, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Amazon, and Google do?

~~~
arminiusreturns
Not at all. They provide little pieces. Businesses still have to cobble them
together. Which is my whole point.

------
Cau5tik
Sublime Text isn't free.
[https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text](https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text)

~~~
wolco
You can use Sublime Text 2 forever.

[https://www.sublimetext.com/2](https://www.sublimetext.com/2)

Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license
must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit
for the evaluation.

~~~
oarsinsync
You can use use it forever without a license, but you shouldn't.

There are lots of honour based / social contracts that essentially function
because enough of us abide by them. If enough people do not, they go away.

Or as the saying goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."

~~~
wolco
So someone should uninstall the program and download a true open source
product like vscode. Because using it by the terms listed on the download page
is breaking a social contract. If we don't no one will offer a free editor
again?

\- There is a reason they offered a free unlimited trial. They were unknown
and by offering it for free they increased popularity, increased business /
education licenses sold. By me switching to another editor I stop telling
people I use that editor my company stops purchasing that license. We all
lose. Nevermind version 3 doesn't have that wording, so version 2 can be seen
as a gateway product to onboard developers into version 3.

\- Even though vscode is open source by supporting that editor you are
supporting big microsoft over a much smaller company. Long term this hurts
small developers more. I think open source can hurt small players when used by
larger corps trying to get you to buy into there paid ecosystem.

~~~
vpEfljFL
VSCode is not "true open source product". It's event not open source. It's
"open core", i.e. proprietary version of "code" project with additional
proprietary components: telemetry, special configuration and so on.

------
lhr0909
I feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a
few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and
issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably
condense them into a centralized spot.

~~~
noahtallen
Additionally, one could sacrifice on features and use GitHub projects instead
of Trello. That’s what we do at work. Not great, but pretty painless for
tracking dev work

~~~
falcor84
Sure, but in this particular example, they're on the free Trello tier, and I'd
say it's already more full-featured than GitHub projects.

Btw, another cool alternative that I've been playing with lately is ClickUp,
which also has a generous free tier.

And on a general note, given that these days all of these systems have good
APIs and export capabilities, I'd say there isn't that much business case to
consolidate to fewer systems.

------
taylorwc
It's fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a
team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github.
When I add a few staff members, I'll happily pay for Slack and Notion.

Yes, it's a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of
all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it's
worth it. If I close one deal, it's worth it. But really I love that I can set
up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend
my time thinking about higher-value things.

I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really
expensive as you scale, but I'm pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can
find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly
cost.

------
oarsinsync
> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack.
> Free since we built it ourselves :)

If the service you're providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You
don't need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving
them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the
books.

It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you're not willing to pay
$x/month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to
change to make it worth $x/month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y
(or $x+y? Are you under charging?)

Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your
product!

------
city41
What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team?

Also Github? You can now have private repos with up to three collaborators for
free.

~~~
Axsuul
They are free for personal private repos. Team private repos aren't!

~~~
vidyesh
I think OP is trying to say they don't need to pay for the Pro or for the Team
as there are just two collaborators, the free version includes 3 collaborators
on private repos. [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

~~~
city41
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I suppose having the code in a personal
repo gives the repo owner more power? I've never founded a startup, so not
sure how typical cofounder trust dynamics are.

------
noncoml
Please consider paying/donating for smaller “free” tools like sublime etc.

------
insulanian
It would be interesting to see this kind of list for the "start-ups" in '90s.
I guess Windows and MS Office licenses would be unavoidable items on the list.

------
joemaller1
Remember when web pages linked to other web pages?

------
Proziam
I feel this on a near-spiritual level.

Once you factor in communication tools (including but not limited to...project
management, email, calendar, chat, VOIP, and CRM) alongside your "real"
technical stuff that actually powers your services or products, you invariably
end up with a ton of different tools because nobody has the time to even _try_
to build all those different core components.

There's a ton of friction to doing anything differently. For example, I'm
fairly anti-google. Therefore, I host my own email. Doing that, even in the
most simplistic way possible, means utilizing several tools or technologies
(mailinabox + a deliverability service being the most simplistic I can
imagine). A larger operation would certainly have more specific needs that
would require another approach - and the human effort of implementation and
maintenance that goes with it.

We have a handful of people, in 3 different countries, each requiring
differing currencies (USD, GBP, EURO). Our client base is global. Combine the
operational complexity with everything else and even a small operation can
start to feel like a fortune 500 company.

------
kludgekraft
As a B2B startup building an enterprise product, we've had to be wary of using
external services as a part of our offering. Our customers prefer
predictable/fixed-annual pricing and do not sign up for saas pricing models,
especially the ones that cost a lot at scale. Also, this eats into our margins
as the external service has no obligation/contract to reduce prices.

------
golergka
I'm rewatching Mad Men now, and I'm amazed how many people in that era were
busy on administrative tasks that are completely automated now – set on 2010s,
this series would be about a boutique digital agency that would employ under
10 people, total. This list of software may be long, but without it, it
wouldn't be possible to do this with just a 2-person team.

------
giorgioz
Truth is you don't need most of SaaS when you start. No-one is saying this
out-loud because a lot of SaaS users are also SaaS selles.

Sentry, use free tier or self host or use Bugsnag free tier

Slack, use Skype instead

Notion, use Google Docs instead

AirTable, use Google Sheets

Office/coworking, work from home or cafes!

These huge usage of other SaaS is caused by venture backed companies with a
lot of cash looking for an IPO. In practice if you are boostraped instead of
venture based you don't want to have a lot of SaaS and/or hire a lot of
employees. Some things like bragging about how many employees or SaaS you are
using only make sense in venture-back land because by spending more you are
getting to the IPO/exit faster but you are sacrificing future long term
margins (which you don't care about since you will be long gone).

I'm a solo bootstrap founder and yes you can clearly see how I'm biased
against venture-backed startups! :D

------
luord
I was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the
tools are used for development.

I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they're
at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing.

So all in all, it makes sense; they're paying for what they deem required to
use. I couldn't justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that
stage.

[1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least
prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply.

On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop
and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I
don't understand _why_ they're paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly
should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth
paying for, but they don't strictly _need_ to.

------
filipsch
If you’re using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will
experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a
pretty bad experience. I’d spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your
dyno is always up.

~~~
vidyesh
[https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/](https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/)

~~~
gbourne
Heroku limits the number of hours you can have up - 550 a month (
[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-
hours](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours) ). So if you
have a system with real users, you really should just pay the $7 a month.

------
ThePhysicist
That's a bit scary on one hand, it's pretty amazing though how much free value
you can get from OS or Freemium tools. We use e.g. the free versions of
RocketChat and Gitlab, they work great and we didn't have many problems
administrating them (once a short outage due to a full disk, but gitlab.com
had multiple outages in the same time frame). So I think if you are willing to
put a little effort into self hosting you have a lot of choices available.
Deployment and maintenance has become easier as well with tools like Ansible
and Docker.

------
rossdavidh
I wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I'm
wondering about: \- time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever
get (some of them it's trivial, others not so much) \- time to do security
reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it
(which is most of them) \- the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought
by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some
cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of
valuable history)

------
paulddraper
Why use both Notion _and_ Trello for product/feature planning?

------
dbg31415
28 tools, and no password manager? Oof.

For "core" accounts, make sure you've got 2FA on. Google for starters. Also
anything to do with code, hosting, or finances.

------
sidcool
Why is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It's decent for chat in a small
Startup.

Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an
overkill.

~~~
cbartlett
The tool they are building appears to integrate heavily with slack.

~~~
sidcool
Oh ok. Then makes sense.

------
giorgioz
I was curious way the author used Slack for 2 people until I saw their SaaS is
a plugin for Slack. As I mentioned in my other comments, startups selling a
SaaS spend so much time writing copies and doing sales pitch of how their SaaS
product is a must-have that they start to believe that also others SaaS are
must-have.

SaaS selling to SaaS might turn into a Ponzi piramid scheme if left unchecked.

------
gjayakrishnan
Subscribe to Zoho One. 40+ integrated apps at $30 /user /month with an annual
subscription (All Employee Pricing).

[https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/](https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/)
[https://www.zoho.com/one/](https://www.zoho.com/one/)

~~~
judge2020
Just curious, do you work for Zoho?

~~~
gjayakrishnan
Yes

------
rs23296008n1
I'd be interested to see your disaster recovery plans for each choice you've
made. When any of those fail what do you do for continuity? How do you back up
your data?

What's your failover time between the site being down or other issue and being
able to switch to different service?

Or is there no plan because all websites are assumed always up... ?

------
narenkeshav
There are certain dev tools like Gitlab/Github or AWS/GCP for your product.
Besides can't things be simplified to just a couple of tools

Like just 1\. Gsuite/Office 365 2\. Asana/Notion

I am building a startup (Early stages) & think about this. I want to create
one or two tools & use it.

Why need airtable, notion & trello at the same time?

------
z3t4
One thing i've noticed about markets is that when there a little to choose
from you buy few tools, but expect them to do more, and you are prepared to
invest time into learning them. However if there are a lot to choose from, you
want more simple tools, dont want to invest time, and prefer the tools you
already know.

------
somberi
For about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared
to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for
founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is
roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we
live in!

------
aequitas
Some open source companies offer free use of their product if your product or
organisation is open source as well. For our tool[0] we got offered free use
of Gitlab Gold and a Sentry account for error tracking.

[0] [https://websecuritymap.org/](https://websecuritymap.org/)

------
zuhayeer
We at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free
versions of most services (helps that we’re only 2 people) and essentially are
only paying for AWS. We’ve always found that there are cheap high quality
alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 / month.

------
5kyn3t
What is the value of Figma ($24 / month for Designing product mocks..) Why not
just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious,
as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is
there some USP?

------
bernardlunn
I am running a small bootstrapped venture and use a lot of very low cost apps.
It works well, particularly as integration tools become much more
sophisticated. Loosely coupled looks messy but wins over tightly coupled big
enterprise systems

------
ile
I have made this tool, which tries to help with this kind of situation:
[https://aamu.app/](https://aamu.app/)

It already has quite a bit of features, but more features come quite
regularly.

------
rammy1234
why don't you use basecamp ? It does says it replaces quite a number of tools.

------
SergeAx
I wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?

~~~
thatsnice
I think it’s because there are 2 of them, each on the $6 plan. G Suite charges
per person.

------
ntnsndr
Suddenly my lab's Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron
subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity
tools with linked accounts.

------
moiz_ahmed
Find it interesting that they're paying for premium versions of all those
tools yet are using free heroku dynos.. Doesn't that result in their app
sleeping?

------
jasonshen
> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack.
> Free since we built it ourselves :)

Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?

------
ftreml
gsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code,
slack, discord

partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and
bitbucket.

------
wellthisisgreat
Slack, Notion, Airtable, Figma, Sentry (maybe), Hubspot

seem to be really unnecessary subscriptions since there are actually better
free or one-time payment alternatives.

------
tamalsaha001
Thanks for the list. Curious how does Mixplanel compare to Google Analytics?
Is it for similar use-case or different?

------
mannykannot
This is brought home to me whenever I take the time to document a process.

------
aabbcc1241
Some of the listed paid services either has free alternatives or can be easily
DIY or self hosted on light vm or raspberry PI with fair enough functionality
if you do not want to pay for them. Including error monitoring, topic/channel
chatroom, git server.

------
analog31
During a gold rush, sell shovels

During a shovel rush, sell shovel making tools

------
KaoruAoiShiho
What's the advantage of Robo 3T over Mongo compass?

------
docdeek
Airtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?

~~~
luckydata
Not even close

~~~
docdeek
Strange. I’ve found that HubSpot’s CRM and salespipe features are pretty good,
especially for a small startup. Maybe I am missing something in Airtable.

------
TsomArp
I really don't get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can
have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some
features, but for the most part it works.

------
ada1981
Please link to all the tools!

------
buboard
i wonder if that leaves them any time to work on their own product

------
JoeAltmaier
And your hardware took 100's of tools to make. So what?

------
pjc50
SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real
estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of
money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's
practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups
is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

~~~
Shacklz
> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable
> alternative to wealth taxes.

That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at
best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table
or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.

~~~
heartbeats
Anything is better than nothing, isn't it?

Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to
be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably,
preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.

~~~
aguyfromnb
> _This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market._

Arguably is the right word.

The global economy is a closed system, so money put _anywhere_ makes its way
elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but
not necessarily any better than other investment.

Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides
capital for companies as well as income for banks and brokers and finance folk
of all sorts (which can _then_ be spent in restaurants and shops). Sure, lower
income people have a higher propensity to spend a marginal dollar (because
they _have_ to), but that isn't necessarily "better".

~~~
heartbeats
What about tax havens and such? As you said, if I put some money into the
stock market,

* my broker/bank takes some. If my broker is a public company, some of the money goes to pay operational expenses, and some of the money goes to their shareholders as dividends.

* the stocks I bought go up slightly. They get cheaper capital, and their owners get an unrealized gain.

Schematically, we can assume all bank employees put all their money into the
stock market. So the end result is that the benefits accrue to shareholders of
public companies, regardless of which stock you buy.

But if money never exits the financial system to go back into the real
economy, none of this matters. If a large chunk of the public stock market is
held by buy-and-hold investors who just never liquidate their investments nor
pay tax, this money will never come to benefit ordinary folks.

Some of it will, by way of pension funds and whatnot. But it's worse than
spending it on normal consumption, as I see it.

------
jmtucu
No VS Code? Really?

------
leephillips
I noticed this:

    
    
        LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) - Finding leads to contact
        SalesQL ($29 / month) - Finding email addresses for leads
    

I don't know who these people are, but it looks like their business involves
spamming people.

------
ericlewis
I may be lazy but I had to do math to figure out what you spend. Maybe total
it? Just as a litmus test.

~~~
bcrosby95
> we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month

------
ddevault
My two-person startup only uses one SaaS - Twilio, to send Prometheus alarms
to my phone, which costs just a few cents at this volume. We use Freenode IRC
instead of Slack, but that barely counts. For meetings we set up a Mumble
instance, which is the most reliable setup I've tried. All of our
infrastructure is on owned hardware, colocated. For taking notes I use text
files.

More to the point of what these folks are using: Mixpanel, Fullstory, Hubspot,
SalesQL, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are unethical and you should not use
them. It's not "growth hacking", it's spam. You are a spammer. Drift is
annoying, no one likes your chat widget. Seems to me like these guys are
drinking the kool-aid pretty hard.

