Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc.

The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap, at $0.60 per month [+]. (Colin, get on the gravy train, you're welcome it it.)

SaaS is a very small portion of my businesses' total expenses. I spend more on hosting and telecomm (largely due to the line of business which is, well, an international telecomm). People are also much more expensive then software, even to the limited extent at which I hire people.

[+] It turns out that a) this had creeped up to $3 per month and b) my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now. grumble grumble picodollars grumble grumble Would happily pay $100 a month to not feel what I'm feeling right now. grumble grumble

You would have received an email when your account balance hit 7 days worth of storage costs. And another when it hit zero. And another 7+ days later.

But if you're saying I should have a mechanism for automatically re-billing credit cards when a Tarsnap account balance gets low -- yes, that's on my to-do list.

(1) http://blog.carrier-connect.com/raspberry-gsm-gateway/

So I doubt he is just talking about a generic office phone when mentioning teleco services.

Now my SaaS spending is $0 or $10 depending on if you count Spotify as SaaS.

[1] - http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

Edit: I should add that Let's Code JavaScript isn't a side project; it's my primary revenue stream.

  1. DigitalOcean - $110/month
  2. Google Apps - $5/month
  3. UptimeRobot - Free (just as good as Pingdom)
  4. CloudFlare - Free (serving under 2 TB/month)
  6. Amazon S3 - $1.40/month
  7. MixPanel - Free
  8. HeapAnalytics - Free
  9. Google Analytics - Free
  10. BaseCRM - Free
  11. MailChimp - Free
  12. Mandrill - Free
  13. Tumblr - Free (our blog)
  14. CloudBees - Free (build, maven repos etc)
  15. Desk.com - $3/month
  16. NewRelic - Free (server monitoring)
  17. GoDaddy - $9/year

Yikes.

We do outsource various infrastructure things to specialists. Hosting and payment collection are the two largest categories.

However, our experience has been that every time we've considered SaaS, it comes down to a balance something like this:

Pros:

- Saves time.

- Offers a tried and tested solution to some problem.

Cons:

- Requires effort up-front to integrate it.

- Requires effort up-front to customize it to fit our needs as well as it can.

- Such customization isn't always possible.

- We're allergic to lock-in, and we've seen goalposts moved after our money has been taken in the past.

- May have deal-breaking privacy/security implications.

- Has ongoing costs, which may or may not scale favourably as we grow.

The only areas that tip towards SaaS on that balance for any of our projects tend to be very simple tasks that require negligible effort to integrate or customize, involve no data that is highly sensitive or valuable, and are expendable without causing noticeable harm to our business while we make other arrangements. In other words, they're things where the cons don't really apply because it's not big or important enough to worry about them. Most of those are readily available as someone's free plan anyway at the kinds of scales we're talking about here.

For anything more important than that, we've found that doing things manually at first soon shows up which areas will most benefit from automation for any given project, and we tend to automate heavily once a need becomes clear. We just do it the old-fashioned way using scripting, spreadsheets, and various other software tools that have proven helpful.

Bitbucket: Free with 29 private repositories.

GitHub: Maybe $7 in the future. I would like to test my product against their enterprise version and $7 is the cost to join the developer program but they don't say you are are guaranteed a test license. Obviously if I can't get a test license, it doesn't make sense to pay for a plan.

DigitalOcean: $15 - $50. I really see them as a cheap download service for my products installer which is 225MB. It's basically $5 for 1 TB. This sounds like a good deal, but if somebody could correct me, I would love to know.

Stripe: $0 because my product is in beta and is free.

Google Business Email: $50/year

For everything else, I can do on my own.

SIDE NOTE

--------------------------------------------

I would like to test my OS X installer on as many different versions as I can, so I'm wondering is their a VPS service for OS X?

So I continued to pay the $100/mo with no real income coming in, just to host my own site plus a few others for a few local businesses that I didn't really have the heart to pull the plug on (since I was working, it wasn't too big of an issue for me).

Once I started selling my software on my site in August 2010, I would say in that first month I more or less broke even for the first time in forever and the income rate has remained fairly constant since then (about $200-300/mo).

Current expenses are: $100 - Rackspace Cloud Sites (I'm locked into the old pricing...now it's $150/mo) $6 - AVLUX Subversion Hosting $7 - GitHub Plan $1 and change for Sendgrid's Lite Plan Plus the occasional renewal costs for one of the domains I have.

However, does it not look more like, get the most from the few?

I don't run or own any Sass Products, so I may be utterly wrong, but won't it not be that there is a gradual increase in price along with multiple options instead of the typical (i) free for the not-so-usable one instance (ii) ~$20 for barely yourself (iii) ~100 for cool and hip but (iv) we're keeping the best for the last at ~$500 (v) of course, the mega corps can email us for to talk about their 10,000th employee.

What about a dynamic pricing where I'm not fleeced at $19 per user per month but more of - it starts with $19 but then to support the next user is rather simple and cost-effective, let is be just $4.99?

As I said, just my thought, I'm yet to experiment with pricing and see them for myself.

As for the questions, I run few side projects and a UI/UX Consulting Service and I'm within $100 per month - from invoicing, to hosting to project management to version control.

$7.50/month for your first user. $2.50/month for your second user. In theory you could, if you talk with us, maybe go up to 6-7 users, but really at that rate you are likely to be better off going with our premium service of $30/month which gets you a VM of specific capacity aimed at around 10 simultaneous users (that also comes with it the chance of customization and integration with your business network). That service can scale up and out as needed but with additional cost.

The major differences between the basic and plus offering is that since you get a full VM with the plus offering, you can get direct access tot he database, integrate with your network via VPN, or re-use your LDAP or Active Directory services for single sign-on. Additionally it is possible to customize the offering in ways that are not possible in the less expensive, multi-tenant offering.

We actually thought through that issue. I will admit our site isn't nearly perfect yet but hey we're two geeks trying to make a go of it without as much time or resources as we would like.

[1] http://www.efficito.com

I do spend money on various IaaS offerings. But none of the services on top of that have come up so far as something I feel I need. But I'm doing mostly research (which is also my job) and side projects, not running a tech business. I need servers, not so much services. There are some vaguely relevant services (like machine-learning-as-a-service), but I generally don't feel comfortable being dependent on an external service for my actual research. So I'd only use these if it was an ancillary need and not something where I might need to publish the results. There's also a move towards asking researchers to ship VMs of their test setup as a replicable archive of the work, and dependencies on external services are a no-go for that.

For my personal life, Dropbox is the closest I came to paying for. But then I realized I was mostly just using it to back up photos, which seemed like a use-case it's not even designed for. So I moved those to a local backup + Flickr.

http://eswat.ca/expenses/

Since the tool supports an offline process we don't have incredible loads, so we use the free tier of most other services (e.g. SendGrid, etc.)

What are you spending your $200 on?

Windows Azure Google Apps GitHub Dropbox Evernote

The simple fact is we couldn't do what we do by purchasing hardware, its so much more cost effective at this scale. Mostly AWS with Cloudant and bits of Rackspace as well as a few smaller suppliers.

Take that with the grain of salt that our total marketing spend is $0. We don't even use Mixpanel or any equivalent to track what our users are doing.

Side projects: Around $40 a month split across 2 services - Gtihub, Asana

if you're running a business you will have to get accustomed to spending large amounts of money and not let it spook you.

just make sure your per-seat software costs are reasonable and it will track linearly and profitably with your success.

  Digital Ocean $15
  Netflix       $10
  Spotify       $10
  Domain Names  $5  (yearly/12)
  --------------------
  Total         $40

Using quite a few free services like Pingdom, Cloudflare, Analytics etc...