How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

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#1

“We’re sharing our spending here in hopes it’ll be useful for other startups that use and or sell online software.” […]

“Below is a list of what we’re spending a month for every SaaS service based on actual October numbers. In cases where we pay annually, the monthly equivalent is shown. I’ve excluded pure hosting (Amazon, Linode, etc.), but included email service providers like MailChimp. I’ve also excluded software we use for free, such as Google Apps for Work.”

“To give you an idea of our scale, our company has ten employees in our NYC headquarters, and about a dozen people working for us remotely worldwide.”

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SaaS we use for KickoffLabs SaaS
#2

Amazing how much service you get for the price of one secretary.

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#3

Wow. That’s quite a list of SaaS apps.

#4

That’s a long list of services indeed. For reference, my company employes me plus two part time employees, and we spend over $4K/year on SaaS products.

EDIT: Heck, I might as well post the list as well: Pusher, Olark, CampaignMonitor, Basecamp, SendGrid, Freckle, Followup.cc, Dropbox, Filepicker, DigMyData, Beanstalk. I think that’s all.

#5

Very insightful, thanks for sharing!

#6

It does seem like a lot. I think the flip side is that’s also a lot of software they don’t have to maintain on their own systems. Perhaps if you use enough SaaS apps, they can pay for themselves by eliminating the need for another IT person and some more servers/storage/backup.

In the comments on the article, the point was made that the price of some of the services did not match the value provided (which can be taken as a reminder to experiment with charging more).

#7

$20 a month here, $30 a month there, suddenly you find you are spending hundreds per month on a bunch of services.

About once a year I review each service I’m using, as to whether I can stop using it, change to a lower plan, or switch to a competitor.

(What I use: GitHub, YouTrack, Kashoo, AWeber, MailChimp, Wistia, WebTranslateIt, Vanilla Forums, Snappy, WP Engine. The total cost is a fraction of my payroll/contractor expenses.)

#8

We’re at somewhere north of $10k a year, if your definition of SaaS excludes hosting/telephony but includes all the other usual suspects. I’ll have a more exact number for you in a few days after the bookkeepers get done, in my yearly round-up.

An abbreviated list (all monthly unless otherwise noted):

GoToMeeting (demos + webinars): $99
TouchingBase.io (email follow-up): $50
BeSnappy (woot woot): $20
Basecamp Suite (me paying them for making Rails, mostly): $99
Deadman’s Snitch: $19
Blinksale (for invoiced accounts, a handful every year): $9
Scout (app/server monitoring): $49
ConvertKit (email marketing): $125
Airbrake: $15
VWO: $49
SendGrid: $90 (two accounts)
Eyewitness.io: $8 (still kicking tires – more monitoring to monitor my monitors)

That’s about $640 a month. We pay a couple of the larger ones on an annual basis, though, so I’m pretty sure we hit $10k. I’ll ask the bookkeepers after they’re done.

#9

We definitely need to get you switched to Honeybadger :slight_smile: