
Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business - patwalls
https://daily.patwalls.co/apps-services-that-i-pay-for
======
qubex
I’m going to be cynical and applaud the author at one of the most effective
S.E.O. efforts I have seen lately: including his own app on a list of
effective and well-curated apps for startups.

~~~
donmcronald
I think it's unethical. It's very similar to all of the paid content garbage
that's saturated Google over the last few years.

Is his app really the best option in that product space?

I know most people around here will applaud the effort as clever, but I think
it's the type of tactic that's ruining the internet. Nothing gets published
without some marketing related alterior motive.

~~~
angelbar
"All The Apps That _I_ Pay For"

------
reidjs
If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical
background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO
droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is.

[https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-
configuring-a...](https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-
a-digitalocean-droplet-to-host-server-side-rendered-web-
applications-382fdce32ff)

~~~
patwalls
I'd like to switch platforms but I'm SO fast and comfortable with Heroku.

Change costs for me might be high. I'd rather spend time on marketing /
features that could get me 3 more customers/month to make up for it...

I learned Heroku at my coding boot camp and they have made thousands of $$ off
of me since...

~~~
jblake
Agreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business.
The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading
postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on
switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not
a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated
wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.

~~~
reidjs
If you want an in-between I'm a huge fan of DigitalOcean. Fantastic
documentation, better support in my experience, all in all more welcoming to
the 'middle-guy.' Totally understand that it's probably not a great use of
your time to switch over if your margins can afford 800/mo with ease.

~~~
hopia
DigitalOcean certainly is great, I'm using it too, but it's still far more
work running your stuff there vs Heroku.

------
marceldegraaf
@patwalls a note regarding Sendgrid. As a user of their free tier (for a
freelance job) I was recently bitten by a shared IP that was put on a block
list, probably due to abuse by another Sendgrid user.

Support does not migrate accounts on the shared IP pool to another IP,
basically leaving me unable to send email for days.

Might be worth upgrading to their Pro plan ($90/mo). This gets you your own
dedicated IP so this won't bite you in the future.

~~~
crispyporkbites
Dedicated IPs can be worse for low senders, as there's no other legitimate
volume coming through outside of your own, so you need to build and maintain
your own reputation entirely.

Ideal solution would be a provider that only allows trusted people on shared
IPs. Generally a non-free provider will be best for that.

~~~
em-bee
how is building and maintaining your own reputation a problem for low volume
sender?

~~~
crispyporkbites
If you don’t build a reputation your emails won’t get delivered. New IPs have
no reputation, so your users will suffer.

------
ttoinou
Since you use Stripe you receive directly money from customers (100K USD
annually according to [https://patwalls.co/2019-going-full-time-as-a-
founder](https://patwalls.co/2019-going-full-time-as-a-founder) ) without an
intermediary to handle VAT / GST

how do you handle VAT / GST globally ? Are your customers restricted to some
locations ? Do you file VAT / GST return only for a few states ?

------
0xTJ
Just a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60%
to make reading comfortable on a laptop.

~~~
PakG1
That's weird, I've never ever heard someone complain that a font was too big
to be comfortable to read before. Do you have any sense what about it makes it
more uncomfortable for you? Small fonts are easy to explain.

~~~
teach
I've reached an age where I have trouble reading small fonts, and often zoom
the web page to be readable. In fact, I have HN permanently set to 125%.

Yet even I thought the font was too big in this one. I _didn't_ have to shrink
the text to be more readable but I had to scroll more than usual.

------
BlameKaneda
I tallied up everything and he spends about $18,348/year. Assuming he's making
enough of a profit, his expenses seem worth it.

------
ttoinou

       Upwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers.
      I especially use Upwork because I don't have
      to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc.
    
    

The same for me, and they take a cut both sides (3% or 50 USD / month + 3%
fees USD/EUR on my side and 5 to 10% on the freelancer side). I was wondering
if there was an alternative to upwork for those who only need it for its
automatic billing system + time tracking + weekly summary + screenshots of
work (don't need to research for new talents).

I guess time tracking tool could enter this market

~~~
swalsh
I've tended to avoid Upwork, because it seems onerous on Freelancers, and also
seems to result in the commoditization of freelancers. Working with that kind
of talent can be burdensome. The best results require you to be ultra specific
in your requests. I guess I'd prefer spending a bit more on Smart people...
but those guys aren't on Upwork.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Where are they?

------
eljimmy
This list would be a lot more interesting if he disclosed what his business
actually was...

~~~
patwalls
I run starterstory.com and trypigeon.co.

~~~
eljimmy
Awesome, thanks for replying!

------
mdorazio
Great list. I'm seeing $1529/month + stripe fees (probably 2.9%). Most of that
is Upwork and Heroku.

~~~
river99
I'd be curious to see what the other side is as well.

------
bilekas
I like this list as a list of services that I would like to write, maybe
improve on and undercut. :)

------
ineedasername
As Upwork is both the single largest spend and actually larger than all the
others combined, I'd be curious about an additional breakdown of costs for
what types of services are being purchased through the platform.

------
john-tells-all
hi Pat! I'd love to subscribe to your blog, but couldn't find an RSS feed.
Could you add one? Thanks!

My wife has a consulting business, so forwarded your practical list of service
to her.

~~~
patwalls
I built this daily journal thing a few months ago, just been hacking on it.
Not too much of a blog but just to keep myself writing every day and putting
my ideas down.

Thinking about ways to keep people updated, but I want to keep it minimal with
no CTAs or email list. RSS is easy to add.

Open to suggestions.

------
jdtbuchanan
I would be interested to hear why you use Sendgrid and Klaviyo? Is that just
legacy transaction emails or are there features you can't accomplish with one
or the other?

~~~
patwalls
I use Klaviyo to send a weekly newsletter to my lists, drip sequence after
signup, or one-off marketing emails.

I use SendGrid for when users sign up, reset password, etc.

------
pottertheotter
Anyone used Streak and Pigeon? Curious to hear thoughts?

------
strogonoff
I'm curious whether Upwork actually makes $1000 per month in fees from
author's business. That'd be quite impressive, meaning upwards from $10k per
month on contractor-related expenses (assuming Upwork takes at least 10%).

Alternatively, this could mean that actual contractor bills add up to about
$1000 per month total, including Upwork fees.

------
1stcity3rdcoast
This is a good summary of The monthly investment for even a one-person side
project.

Do you also use an accounting tool like QuickBooks or Xero?

~~~
patwalls
No, just spreadsheets for now, but I do pay for a tax accountant. I will add
that right now.

~~~
disiplus
what is wip.chat, the homepage is useless.

~~~
endorphone
A producthunt simile it seems.

~~~
Pete-Codes
WIP came out long before Product Hunt started doing something similar.

~~~
endorphone
Okay. I meant no judgement on lineage or merit, but producthunt is the
relative frame of reference that I think most people on HN would understand.

Can you clarify on your point, though? PH has been around since at least 2013.
The .chat TLD didn't go live until 2015, and that specific domain was
registered is late 2017. Do you mean a specific features like todo or
something?

Both sites are ostensibly primarily motivated by self-promotion, usually under
the guise of some sort of public productivity tools.

~~~
keesj
Hi there. Maker of BetaList and WIP here. I think there are two things being
conflated.

BetaList (startup discovery platform) was created before Product Hunt, and WIP
(our community for makers) is an offshoot of that. Product Hunt eventually
launched a similar service.

FWIW, I have to strongly disagree that WIP is primarily motivated for self-
promotion. It's really more like a virtual co-working spaces where we all
share what we're working on (hence the name), exchange feedback, keep each
other accountable, etc.

BetaList and Product Hunt are indeed partly about self-promotion and partly
about discovery.

------
danieljacksonno
In the end I subscribed to so many digital services that I made a tool for
collecting email receipts for bookkeeping...

If you think it's worth one more subscription to cut down the work bookkeeping
for all the other subscriptions, then check out receiptrunner.com

~~~
swalsh
There's something to this. I recently changed my credit card number due to
some fraud activity. Since the change there has been a number of services I no
longer use, but that I had completely forgot about popping up asking me to
update my info.

~~~
juped
If you use American Express, they actually update things for you, or continue
accepting the old number for specific recurring billings where they don't have
the system in place to update the number.

------
klhugo
That was a very nice breakdown of costs for a side project. Thanks for sharing
this!

------
busterarm
Interestingly you're paying people to do on Upwork about what I priced out for
the absolute cheapest ERP/CRM software to run my own business.

~~~
patwalls
Haha! What ERP are you using, if you don't mind me asking?

Also, I wrote a little bit about my approach to freelancers, may give you some
more context on that $1k/month: [https://www.starterstory.com/hire-
freelancers](https://www.starterstory.com/hire-freelancers)

~~~
inviromentalist
Starter story spam

------
mxschumacher
I've read mixed reviews about Upwork (low quality work, people not being paid
etc). What are better alternatives to find freelancers?

~~~
travellingprog
I've been a freelance full-stack developer for the past 1.5 years. I never
bothered trying out Upwork, because I had the impression the price competition
there was insane, so I can't comment on the experience there. But I've been on
Toptal for the past year and it's been an overall great experience. Not only
have I not had an issue being paid, but Toptal actually guarantees my invoice
payments: basically there's a clause that states that I can expect a payment
from Toptal within a few days after the invoice due date, regardless of
whether or not the client actually paid the invoice.

------
reustle
Helpful list, and a good reminder for everyone to check their own lists. Would
have loved to see a "total" :)

------
abinaya_rl
That was a very nice report about ongoing costs involved in the one-man
business

------
3PercentMan
I think Mailbrew is overrated if you have a good twitter feed.

~~~
patwalls
What I love about Mailbrew is I can specify things like:

\- send me X top tweets from X user in last month

\- send me all tweets with the words "XYZ"

And for the obvious reasons it keeps me off twitter and less subject to their
addictive design/UI.

------
zanek
You should post these on yourstack.com so it’s easier to aggregate and comment
on. The product hunt team just released that. I hadn’t heard of Wip but am
keen to see if there is any value in joining it. Thanks

------
martinrlzd
Thank you! I feel like building the right thing. :)

------
isthis129283
$1529...you're welcome.

------
crazygringo
Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?!

I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a _quarter_ of the pixel area) just to
make it readable.

This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but
this is the worst I've ever seen.

When the size of each letter is something like _six times_ the area of letters
in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong.

Is it unreasonable to expect body text on the web to be roughly the same size
as the body text used in my computer's menus and dialogs? Obviously those
should already be set to the ideal legible size, so what is with these blogs
deciding to choose mega-sized letters instead??

~~~
hombre_fatal
The beauty of web clients is that you can control the font size if it looks
bad on your device.

~~~
rchaud
I don't think it's possible on mobile. Yesterday I found myself needing to
adjust the font size on rateyourmusic.com's responsive site, and it wasn't
possible. On a desktop it's as simple as "CTRL +" but that doesn't exist on
mobile browsers.

~~~
Can_Not
Fennec Textwrap addon for Firefox on Android will slightly improve pinch zoom
text reflow.

------
inviromentalist
My biggest concern is being dependent on these systems, the systems changing,
and it breaking the process.

I have the mentality of self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and
imo more reliable.

Most these services have a learning curve anyway. Are the services really
worth it?

~~~
pembrook
The mentality of DIY and self hosting is the default for most hackers, and in
my opinion its the number 1 thing holding back most engineers who build
businesses.

I have a buddy who’s an amazing engineer, he takes pride in doing everything
himself and spent years building a platform from the ground up. Elegant, fully
automated, built in his favorite languages and frameworks. 3 years in it makes
50k a year.

I have another buddy who is non-technical, 2 years ago he built an ugly, janky
platform off Wordpress and some plugins in a month. He does nothing himself,
outsources everything. His business does $4mil a year.

~~~
webmobdev
One is an engineer, the other is a businessman (salesman and fund raiser).

~~~
dwild
One is someone that over engineer, the other know where to put time and money
to maximize returns.

------
rolltiide
How much they pay for Klayvio? I want to quit Mailchimp

~~~
whitepoplar
Curious, what don't you like about Mailchimp?

~~~
rolltiide
The pricing or the tiered features available. If there is a cheaper one I am
curious about it

------
jasonhr13
Find someone with a college email address and sign up for Github Student
Developer Pack. SendGrid for free (15k/month sends) as well as 150/year in AWS
credit for 4 years if you continue to have access to the student email.

~~~
crispyporkbites
That does not seem like good advice for someone running a business.

