[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.