[fareesh]

At our agency we tend to have a lot of low budget projects, plus we like to keep expenses low if there's a relatively small overhead in return.

For saving on costs we use:

- Bitbucket over Github (Private repos are free, although Github has more features, so it depends on how much you use really)

- Email Hosting Zoho over Google (FREE): We tend to recommend Zoho to single entrepreneurs since it offers 10 accounts for free on your custom domain.

- CMS (FREE): We use our own barebones one that's similar to siteleaf.

- Redis/Web Server/DB Server ($40/mo) Digital Ocean over AWS/Heroku: DO Droplets for launch + initial marketing, and then depending on how things turn out, EC2 or more Droplets.

- SSL (FREE): Recently tried out Let's Encrypt. Works beautifully. Will probably use that for everything in the future.

- Exceptions (FREE): New Relic seems to do a decent job, although the paid plan over at Airbrake seems a lot better. Haven't tried Sentry, but will give it a shot after reading this post.

- Log Management (FREE): We use tail and grep :D It's messy but we survive

- Assets / CDN: Sometimes Cloudflare (free), sometimes S3/Cloudfront (same as article)

- Chat (FREE) Glip over Slack: Glip's free offering is better than Slack's, because you can confine people outside the organization to specific channels, which works fantastically for us.

- Fonts (FREE): We tend to advocate some decent looking Google Fonts that get the job done

[rbritton]

There's also StartSSL (https://www.startssl.com) for certificates too. You can get basic ones for free or pay a relatively cheap amount to get more a higher tier validation. I've been using them for years successfully, and when combined with SNI, I no longer need to pay for a multi-domain certificate.

[rimantas]

StartSSL free certificates are for non-commercial use only. It is burried in the terms, but that is so.

[rbritton]

I just checked and you're right. Their website is very misleading on the subject: "The StartCom Certification Authority, provides the StartSSL™ Free certificates instantly, without limitations". Correct me if I'm wrong, but "Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only." is the very definition of a limitation.

Thankfully it doesn't affect me currently -- I'm using class 2 certificates -- but I'll be doing more research come renewal time.

[somberi]

One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.

[pilif]

> Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.

I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts.

At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a backup copy into a maildir in case Gmail goes away and we need emergency-access to mail).

Google Apps in turn forwards all outgoing mail to that machine too which then makes a backup copy in a Sent-Mail maildir, before actually sending the mails off to the recipients (this step is harder because now it's your responsibility to deal with SPF, PTR lookups and mail server rep in general - but it's no rocket science either)

[ausjke]

I moved from google-apps to zoho, one reason is that google email is not available globally while zoho is, e.g. google-email is totally blocked for Chinese(employees)

[prayashm]

Zoho also has that kinda service. All mails to accounts that don't exist go to the primary admin's account.

[vacri]

Google Apps allows you to create groups for free, or you can alias individual mailboxes (if you're okay with thing@ going to just one person). No need to run through your own middlebox. You do need to make sure that external people can send to the given group, though.

[pilif]

Yeah. I know - but I also wanted the free backups with instant-imapd support for when Google decides that they want to cancel our account for $REASONS and we won't have anybody to call (to this day still my biggest worry with google apps)

[GFischer]

Zoho has been great for me for a long time, but they recently had some major problems (coupled with hugely adverse external factors like a brutal flood), hopefully they've learned from their mistakes, I really want to keep using them and pay them eventually when my startup grows :) .

They're much better at support than Google (which isn't saying much, but at least you have someone that answers).

[jonesb6]

+1 for LetsEncrypt. Really great, and if your using DO their is already a tutorial for it.

Completely free SSL Certificate. 'Nuff said.

[pilif]

>Haven't tried Sentry, but will give it a shot after reading this post.

you should - it's amazing. When I tried it out, the really nice UI and the ability to self-host (it's good to know it's there - we're still using their hosting though as it's way less hassle) it was what immediately won me over.

[viraptor]

Log management can be done for free at the beginning at https://logentries.com/ It's a bit limitted, but saves you logging into the specific servers and it does have email notification.

[ben_utzer]

gandi.net gives some email addresses with the domain you buy.