[patio11]

Running a business is much, much more expensive than you'd expect if you've never done it before. I started one on $60 so I get the mindset which has people suggesting that this story represents prolifigate spending, but oh my goodness, it's practically a shoestring.

There is an individual thing in the AR deployment which exists for no technical purpose to get us a piece of paper issued by Rackspace which we need for legal reasons. That thing costs more than everything on this page combined. We have one part-time employee; she's 3X more expensive than that thing.

If you're put off by $80 for a database wait until you get quoted rent, insurance, taxes, accounting fees, any engagement with a professional, review of a customer's MSA to sell them an enterprise contract, healthcare for a single person, travel to a single conference, the wifi at the hotel for a single conference, etc etc.

Also: there is virtually no scenario under which a SaaS app grossing $Xk per month has a better financial or technical outcome by working on minimizing expenses when you could be working on selling more accounts and selling better accounts.

[idlewords]

I have to strongly disagree with you. I run my own online thing and find that keeping expenses down has given me a huge competitive advantage over similar sites.

I would also stress that there are other reasons to keep complexity down, like hating to do paperwork (or work of any kind).

[tempestn]

Ha, I totally hear you on the second one. There are a number of situations where I've chosen to do something in-house rather than using one of these vendors, partially because I prefer to spend time managing the technical solution over (admittedly much less time :) ) handling the paperwork of one more vendor.

Of course, it's also just my natural inclination. My common response to problems is more along the lines of, "I can write a script to do this," than, "I bet there's a SaaS for this." That may well be inefficient, but it's how I roll.

[vacri]

The peak spending in the graph is about $1300 for the month. This is barely more than one single employee's salary if they're on the US federal minimum wage ($7.25 x 40 hours x 4 weeks = $1160), and that's before you have to pay the employee overheads. It then settles down to around half this amount.

For a company with multiple employees, this really is peanuts. If you can do better, that's great, but it's not the standard experience in business.

[applecore]

What's more remarkable is the number of services and integrations that are necessary to keep a SaaS product running. Even on a shoestring budget, that's a lot of complexity to manage.

[j45]

More than the cost, the micro-integration hell that you start to get into and out of (when swapping out) can be a real slow down to building and shipping features

[shubhamjain]

I am sorry but what is AR deployment?

[barry-cotter]

Appointment Reminder deployment, i.e. deploying one of the SAAS websites Patrick owns

[patio11]

Yep. n.b. "deployment" is another word for "the production environment considered as a system." (For the first few years I would have said "server" but these days it is a wee bit more complicated.)

[goldenkey]

Alternate region