

Free tools we used to build our startup - sdiw
http://blog.shyahi.com/post/62901878131/putting-everything-together-free-tools-for-startups

======
moreentropy
I've been a Unix admin for a long time, so for me depending on all those
external services with unpredictable performance/colocation/reliability sounds
risky and complex.

Is it considered that hard and expensive to just run a full backend stack on
your own machines, be it on dedicated servers or AWS etc.? I guess it might
even be cheaper to have someone do a professional server setup for you instead
of having to deal with all those service providers.

~~~
Mahn
> Is it considered that hard and expensive to just run a full backend stack on
> your own machines

Well time is money. Things that are not core to your business like managing
email servers are better off outsourced; not because they are hard, but
because it frees your time from setting up, managing, securing and monitoring
your email servers, and allows you to put it in something that actually
matters to what you do.

------
nikcub
I really enjoy posts like this. I've long had an idea to start a site like
usesthis.com (The Setup) but to interview startups and ask them what tools and
services they use internally.

At Crunchbase we were going to expand company profiles to include services and
tools. We started with PR agencies and law firms[1], etc. as service
providers, but we never found a chance to expand it to more general tools and
services.

Does anybody know if a site like that already exists, or is anybody interested
in implementing something like it?

[1] eg. look at
[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook)
\- down the left-hand side menu you'll find a section called 'Service
Providers'

~~~
Jun8
I don't think it does really. Sites like leanstack.io exist but are not the
same thing, they just provide lists of tools without the great context and
human contact that usesthis has. Other sites have long interviews with
founders without too much emphasis on the tools used.

I am currently adapting the usesthis approach to an idea that I have and would
be very interested in chatting with you, or anybody else who's interested, to
brainstorm on how to proceed with your idea.

~~~
yonasb
We've actually have more detailed posts now (i.e.
[http://blog.leanstack.io/the-cloud-stack-that-helped-
sendgri...](http://blog.leanstack.io/the-cloud-stack-that-helped-sendgrid-
scale-to-100-billion-emails-sent/)). But I'm with you on context, we're going
the interview route moving forward. Glad to chat with you and anyone else to
brainstorm and see how I can be helpful though. Feel free to email me at
yonas@leanstack.io.

------
masnick
I would recommend FastMail over other mail services to founders. Its features
are fairly comparable to gmail (and presumably windows live mail, though I
haven't used it). Additionally, there are some advanced features that seem
particularly useful to small companies: the capacity for setting up lots of
aliases pointing to multiple destinations, the ability to add super cheap
small-storage accounts (good for interns), the ability to share folders, and
Sieve filter scripting support all come to mind.

They also have a pretty transparent, non-evil privacy policy.
[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/02/updated-privacy-
policy/](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/02/updated-privacy-policy/)

Plus, you're now supporting a small independent company!
[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-
st...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-staff-
purchase-the-business-from-opera/)

I wrote a blog post about switching from gmail to FastMail that will give you
an idea of the service if you haven't seen it before.
[http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/](http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/)

------
skizm
For email hosting I use zoho.com which offers a free tier for one domain and
$36/year for more domains and features. I've been using them for a few months
with one of my side projects (onewaybits.com) and recently started another
project with another domain and decided to jump to the paid tier because I had
such a good experience with their free tier.

~~~
goyalpulkit
zoho.com looks nice. But it only gives 20 accounts on the free tier. Windows
live domains, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have a limit on the number of
accounts.

~~~
skizm
Ah, didn't realize that. I'm a solo dev so I didn't run into that limit haha.

------
danpalmer
This is a nice list, and I've used most of the services myself to get small
projects going. It's really great how you can quickly get a project off the
ground for free, and then only start paying if it really does take off.

However, this is one of the problems with all of these services, they are very
expensive. Once you _do_ need to start paying for them, they quickly become
much more expensive than investing a little time into running your own
servers, at least that's the case with Heroku, MongoHQ, and Amazon S3. I
always like to remember that my project is not a 'Heroku' Node app, for
example, it's a Node app that happens to be deployed on Heroku now, and needs
to be deployable on something else in the future at short notice.

~~~
sdiw
Agreed, these are very expensive once you have to start paying for them. But
good, nonetheless, for getting the MVP out and start getting some traction.

------
jeswin
Is there any value anymore in using a platform or service like Heroku or
MongoHQ? You could get a decent VM for as little as $5, and deployment isn't
really as much of a pain anymore. IMO, using all these different services
takes more time, is more expensive, and is less flexible.

~~~
goyalpulkit
You can get a VM cheaply, but then you have to manage everything yourself. I
don't have a lot of experience in this field and would be completely lost if
something suddenly goes down or I need to scale. With Heroku and MongoHQ, you
don't have to worry about these things anymore and its really easy to set up.
And for someone like me who would need several hours in setting up everything
on my own server, even the paid plans don't sound too expensive.

~~~
philbarr
I would agree with this except for the, "you don't have to worry about it." If
it scales by a huge amount over a weekend when you get some exposure, for
example, then the costs can surely increase very quickly?

I think I would rather have things overload and go down than have a remote
service be able to handle it but charge me a fortune.

~~~
nekopa
You make a very good point. But I would rather have a business model in place
which means that if things overload, so does my bank account.

I wish more startups would start up with this premise in mind, as at the
moment I'm looking for specific services for my company, and I have the added
task of trying to determine if the cool startup I'm looking at has a business
model in place so that I don't have to worry about looking for a replacement
for them next year when they close down.

(And yes, I'm looking for stuff which my company can pay for, not freebies)

------
samspenc
Uhhh, I think some of these are NOT free?

Specifically: Heroku, MongoHQ, Amazon S3

~~~
nekopa
Heroku has a free tier, Amazon has a 'first year free' tier for a lot of their
products these 2 I'm using at the moment.

No idea about MongoHQ.

I think the free stuff is basically for making and running an MVP, not for
running at scale...

~~~
samspenc
Cool, thanks for clarifying!

------
neovive
Does anyone else have any experience with Ink File Picker? I recently learned
about the service and am considering it for an upcoming project, but I have
concerns about entrusting a startup with a critical piece of infrastructure
and would hate to have to re-write file uploads if Ink gets bought or decides
to shutdown. We've already experienced this with SimpleGeo and had to re-write
quite a bit of code when they pivoted.

~~~
BryanB55
We use it at
[http://virtualstagingsolutions.com](http://virtualstagingsolutions.com) and
rely heavily on file uploads. We started using it right when they launched
(back when they were filepicker.io) and initially there were some bugs with
resizing images. Lately everything has worked pretty well. Their support seems
pretty responsive and I've only noticed 1 period of downtime within the last 6
months or so which completely made it impossible for our users to upload
anything.

I'll admit that I'm not 100% comfortable using them because I'm really not
sure where they are going in the future, by the looks of their pricing plans
it seems like they would need huge scale to turn a profit and I just don't see
them getting that scale at the moment.

------
borski
For what it's worth, we (Tinfoil Security) have a free plan, but also offer 6
months free to Startups of any of our plans. We also, like MixPanel, offer a
free partner program:
[https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/partner](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/partner)

In any case, MixPanel is another great free tool we use all the time. Their
partner program is great too.

------
speg
Mail gun for email, especially with their new pricing.

~~~
prostoalex
This pricing? [http://www.mailgun.com/pricing](http://www.mailgun.com/pricing)

Curious what the attractiveness is, considering both Amazon SES and SendGrid
charge 10c/1,000 emails from the start. You have to push significant volume at
MailGun to reach 10c/1,000 eventually, but at that level MessageBus is pretty
competitive.

~~~
ferrantim
Mailgunner here. One of the things that differentiates Mailgun is that we
don't gate features, all our features are available for all customers. We've
found that a lot of customers don't have a lot of volume (say only 5000 emails
per month) but the want inbound email parsing, email validation, complete
tracking and analytics, and detailed logs through our events API. You can do
all this, even on our free plan with 10,000 emails per month. So, its really
what you value at what price. Hope that helps.

~~~
prostoalex
Got it and thanks, makes sense. For low-volume, seems like proper comparison
would've been Mandrill, but your guys' feature set seems to be richer.

------
krmmalik
Interesting. I had a look at your Start-Up. It looks very interesting, but I'm
not a developer and would love to see something that could display my social
contributions the way you're doing it for developers.

Do you have anything like this on the cards?

~~~
sdiw
Thanks. This is our first version and we focused mainly on keeping this simple
so that we can get it out and test our idea. We didn't want to get our hands
on OAuth for this version which is why there are some obvious ones (LinkedIn,
Facebook, Instagram etc.) missing. One of our biggest goals with Shyahi is to
create an app that anyone can use. We will be adding more services soon.

~~~
krmmalik
OK, Great. Do you have a mailing list or FB page for updates?

------
TomJoad
I like the post, and it showed me some services that I didn't know about.

What advantage does Amazon's Route 53 have over Cloudflare? I've been using
Cloudflare for all my DNS and CDN needs so I'm curious what Route 53 would
have to offer.

------
davedx
Almost identical list for my side project, except using Modulus.io for my
platform hosting (takes the pain out of deploying Meteor apps). Didn't know
about Windows live domain being free which is useful.

Thanks for posting!

~~~
sdiw
> Didn't know about Windows live domain being free which is useful.

With Google Apps not being free anymore, Windows live domains was the best we
could find. Not sure if someone knows of a better service thats free as well.

------
ajanelisha
Good list. With Heroku, you should checkout papertrail[1] for logging. It is
also free for small volumes.

[1] [https://papertrailapp.com](https://papertrailapp.com)

~~~
sdiw
Yes, we are actually using Papertrail for logging. Missed that one.

~~~
ergo14
Hey sdiw, check out [http://errormator.com](http://errormator.com) \- Since
you are starting out I would be more than happy to provide you with one of our
better accounts for free (our free tier is enough for most young startups, but
i want to give you something better for start).

It will provide you with exception tracking, various performance metrics and
log aggregation.

~~~
sdiw
Looks really good, thanks. I will shortly send you an email through the
contact form on Errormator.

~~~
ergo14
You can email me directly at info@errormator.com, I can help you guys if you
will need advice with integration or give pointers how to do some tricks to
make most out of our service.

~~~
sdiw
That would be great. Thanks again!

------
exo_duz
I found MailChimp is good to build a list of leads. And their free tier is
2,000 users and 12,000 emails per month.

