

Show HN: Stop wasting money on Saas services you don't use - yakshaving
http://saasly.com

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nick007
I think it could be useful, however I just caught myself summing it up to the
guy sitting next to me as "a web service for people who subscribe to too many
web services"

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moe
I'm a little surprised about the praise this is getting here.

"First world problem" seems like an understatement. More like "Silicon Valley
problem"...

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railsjedi
Well, the one thing Silicon Valley does best is solve its own problems :)

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jusben1369
Hah! Very true. Very inward looking right now. What's the world coming to when
the ROI touted on the homepage is "I saved $45 a month!" Well, that sounds too
snarky. I'm sure this will be valuable to a lot of folks.

~~~
railsjedi
Simple honest answer, its a beachhead. Techies are natural early adopters so
it makes sense to start small with them. Trust me, our ambitions are far
greater :)

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toomuchtodo
Eventually you'll get to "Hey! Are you sure you still need Netflix? You
haven't used it in weeks!" =)

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endlessvoid94
Honestly, this is great idea. But I'm not going to forward all my bills to
some random service. If it somehow worked automatically (ridiculous, I know),
I'd absolutely use it.

I just don't want all the overhead.

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railsjedi
Yep, inbox mining (via gmail oauth) is our first dev priority. I agree it's
gotta be automatic for it really to be useful. Thanks for the feedback!

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garethsprice
Alternatively, perhaps you could set up mailboxes for each user that can be
entered as the billing address on the individual services.

eg: On my Freshbooks/Chartbeat/Less Accounting/whatever dashboard, I put in
"gareth+somerandomkey@saasly.com" as the billing address, then all mails from
that service go directly to you - you may even be able to attempt to parse
arbitrary services, looking for a "Total: $n.nn" type string in the e-mail, or
set up per-service parsing.

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amirmc
If you're wondering about the process, look at this link.
<http://saasly.com/confirmation>

Not sure why you wouldn't want to put that front and centre (instead of making
me enter my email first).

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mojowo11
Thank you. I definitely shouldn't have to work to find out what this service
actually does, and there's no way I'm giving my email (even to someone who
says they won't spam me) until I have an idea how the thing works.

~~~
railsjedi
Yeah, good call. We figured we didnt want to confuse users on the "how" while
we were trying to pitch them on the "what".

We'll add a "how do we work" link that brings up this information directly on
the landing page.

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tlrobinson
I wish there were a way to use useful services like this without granting
permission to read all of my email.

~~~
railsjedi
Agreed. That's one reason why we added the email forward (so you just have to
forward the specific bills). But it's a bit manual (though you only ever have
to forward once, we calculate the monthly date for all the other bills for
each service).

Also, we got a great suggestion from someone else about setting up inboxes for
everyone so you can just sign up with services with [yourname]@saasly.com and
then we just look at your bills instead of all your email.

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jff
The idea is pretty neat--I recently got the reminder that my AWS free trial
was expiring soon, which trigger a "holy crap!" moment because I had
completely forgot I was even running an instance there.

That said, seriously guys what is it with ending everything in -ly? It doesn't
even really make sense... "in a manner resembling SaaS"? And you're
saasly.com, not even saas.ly. SaaSmon, SaaSwatch, these sort of indicate what
you're doing, at least, and are reasonably pronounceable too.

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feralmoan
Would Sassly ever tell me I'm paying to much for Sassly or is that too meta?

Thanks, it's a great idea I'll be leveraging soon! :)

~~~
yakshaving
We're free, forever.

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dwynings
You might want to look into inline installation for the chrome extension:

[https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-
store/docs/inline_i...](https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-
store/docs/inline_installation)

~~~
yakshaving
Thanks! That's great feedback :-)

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kirillzubovsky
Personally, if this service could tell me of all the sass software that I am
using, that alone would be tremendously useful.

Recently, just for testing, I subscribed to multiple tools to measure site's
performance, SEO, to help me navigate all the social media chatter, to help me
alleviate emails ...etc.

The only ones I remember are SEOMoz and 37Signals product, because they charge
a lot of money and that's kind of memorable. Everything that charges under 20
bucks is below radar until it accumulates.

If this tool could simply extract this bill information and remind me to
unsubscribe in time, it would certainly be helpful!

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piggity
Then once they mine your inbox / bank statements they can get referral bonuses
for legitimately churning you to alternate energy / insurance / telco
subscriptions etc.

People will hand over all kinds of data to save money.

(Not being snarky, I suspect there is a bigger business model for this)

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sproutingseed
Congrats on executing a cool service. I wouldn't say we are a direct
competitor (mergepay.com), since we are focusing on tracking for businesses
and eventually income/expense tracking. Seems like there is definitely a need
for this kind of thing.

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omelette
Awesome idea and only gonna be better with the mail mining. Once you get some
traction should be easy to sell targeted ads and mine your own data and sell
as market research. Is a Firefox add-on coming soon for the non-Chrome folks?

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yakshaving
Thanks -- Yeah, the service coud definitely be a lot more useful once we're
capable of mail mining. When we get traction, we'll be able to sell more
specific ads and capture some basic, anonymized data about usage.

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btlachance
Before signing up, it'd be great to know what services you "support."

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Terretta
What a fantastic judo move service. Almost feels counter-cultural.

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ojbyrne
I suddenly have this image of a programmer working while seated in one of
those carnival dunk tanks. With a clock ticking away....

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vyrotek
And then I suddenly had this image of very upset developers soaked in the tank
with thousands of dollars worth of laptops and other hardware ruined.

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gmarius
Great tool for individuals AND could be seriously useful to businesses
tracking team usage across several services. Very cool.

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damoncali
How much for your customer list? A list of impulse subscribing customers has
got to be worth something...

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panam1
This is awesome .. have been waiting for this.

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upbeatcorner
I have been waiting for this type of product

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pitdesi
This is a fantastic idea. I could see myself using this thing as a consumer
too (ie not just for hacker stuff). May have much broader appeal than
something just for hackers. Monetization should be fairly straightforward...
You know what apps people have, sell very targeted ads for new stuff, sort of
like a mint. Seems like a potential gold mine once you get to scale.

You should build something that searches through my gmail for common bills
though, I don't want to go through the process of sending you all my bills

