[systemvoltage]

Shhh... you can do almost all of this on Github private repos for free. Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, discussions, ci/actions to trigger other stuff (send notification email for e.g.), storage of docs, revision control, tagging and organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting, support tickets, and so much more with Github API/webhooks :) Startup of this size shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.

You don't even need GSuite/Office 365. Just use Libre Office and git commit them to your github repo for others to look at it. About the only thing you need to pay for is $10/year domain license and $5/month/user for email service such as FastMail. Your SaaS webpage can be statically hosted on FastMail as well.

[qeternity]

Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

For Gmail, docs and drive, G Suite is an absolute bargain. The user experience you describe above (committing Libre office files to git? have you used Libre office) makes me shudder.

[systemvoltage]

Now that I think of it and other comment said - yea, GSuite + Email for $5/month is a bargain.

> Shhh...you can do most things with some other less perfect tool. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".

[mooreds]

> My intent was to encourage others from not thinking "Yeah, I need all this to start a company".

Definitely! when I was first consulting I created all my invoices in OpenOffice doc files, and then emailed them out. I kept track of everything I'd sent out to clients on a spreadsheet. It was worth it because it was free. I didn't have many clients and was just starting out. Wanted to keep my expenses down.

However, after a few years I used FreshBooks, which automatically built an invoice for me. I could run reports easily. I could send the invoice. I could even accept payment via credit card.

It cost me something (I don't remember what it was, but it was under $50/month) and saved me so much time. (There are many competitors to FreshBooks and I'm sure each of them would have done the same.)

That's the tradeoff. Most things can be done for "free" if you count your time as having zero value. That is very rarely the case. It may be a good idea to minimize $$ out the door as much as possible when you are starting, but in a while (even if it takes you years, like it did for me) you'll learn to trade money for time using specialized tools.

[slow_donkey]

Yeah g-suite is a dam bargain especially since it also gets you conferencing, SSO and is one of the few SaaS you'd truly want to buy and retain.

[ymolodtsov]

Most importantly it gets you SSO on basic plans for any SaaS. Big companies using Okta or something have to pay for all those Enterprise plans just for that.

[mooreds]

> Most importantly it gets you SSO on basic plans for any SaaS.

Is that because most SaaS offers "sign in with google"? Or is there something else involved?

[drwicked]

Yep, saves a lot of annoyance having to keep track of a bunch of logins across SaaSs especially when you need to revoke access when someone leaves, so instead of having to go to all the various services individually to deactivate the accounts, you can just deactivate their Google account or revoke its access to those services.

[kyawzazaw]

This comment sounds like the Infamous Dropbox Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Time, energy, attention, creative limit is important for a tiny startups like this.

[yakshaving_jgt]

I don't think it is equivalent, because the Infamous Dropbox Comment is about the behaviour of non-technical consumers. There's a pretty vast chasm between a non-technical consumer trying to set up rsync and a software developer adding a Trello <-> GitHub integration.

It does seem frivolous to me to pay money to automatically close tasks when a linked pull request is merged.

And paying $720 annually to host some frontends? Depending on what they mean by "frontend", this might actually be exactly $720 more than they ought to be spending on this.

[joshmanders]

It's very equivalent. Developers have a hard on for saying "I don't need to pay $5/mo for this when I can just build it in a weekend myself" Then they half ass something that took them probably a month of fiddling to make happen, then they're so vested in this idea that their homegrown bastardization is superior that they spend more time justifying the insane loopholes and workarounds to make it somewhat usable...

[yakshaving_jgt]

That's a total straw man argument.

It doesn't take "a month of fiddling" to add an integration like this. It's already readily available[0] and has been for half a decade. It's also $24 per month — not $5 — at their current scale. These aren't amounts to be sniffed at either. The $720 a year they're paying for "frontend hosting" is not far off what I pay my accountant.

[0]: https://blog.trello.com/github-and-trello-integrate-your-com...

[generalk]

  > Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, 
  > discussions ci/actions to trigger other stuff [...], 
  > storage of docs, revision control, tagging and 
  > organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting,  
  > support tickets

All of these features either work only for devs, or are extremely bare-bones.

Would I love it if my entire company could live in Github? Sure! But fully half the company is composed of folks who will never, ever log in to GitHub.

And don't get me started on issues. For personal stuff I'm GH all the way, but for planning a year's worth of development? It just doesn't fly. I'm looking at Linear now because I dislike JIRA's UX, and GitHub/GitLab both are too lightweight for my needs.

As someone who is beginning to live in financial spreadsheets, I'm damn well happy to pay for SaaS that totals less than a FTE dev and also allows my entire company to move faster as a result. Like, not even a question.

[slow_donkey]

I'm sure our marketing team will love resolving git conflicts to draft their email copy.

[fineline]

Either Gsuite or Office 365 with the Web/mobile apps costs around $5/month/user, and includes Email. Just sayin.

[TameAntelope]

Your comment seems to echo a fairly common refrain in this submission, that a startup should be miserly with their cash.

What's the disconnect, I wonder? Why is there this belief that an early stage startup should pinch pennies? Am I missing something?

For me, time (to spend building and selling) is substantially (like 2-3x or even higher) more valuable than cash at this stage. Am I undervaluing cash?

[systemvoltage]

If you see value and can afford it, sure go for it. The goal of my comment wasn't to dissuade people from spending on SaaS, but rather to inspire others who don't have the luxury of have extra cash to be not discouraged by articles like this.

[Leherenn]

I assume there's going to be a pretty big difference between bootstrapped and funded startups. Efficiency is nice, but you need some runway too. Even if you move fast, your clients probably aren't and you need to last until the momentum gets going.

On the other hand, it's likely many are going too far, there's no point in being a zombie company for years. If you fail, better fail fast.

[Dirlewanger]

It's technical people who don't know the first thing about running a business, and don't know how to properly value their time.

[renewiltord]

$100/mo won't make or break this startup. Inability to move fast might. Money of this scale is not a problem. Remember the insight from The Goal. Optimize at the bottleneck alone.

[frankdilo]

This sounds interesting! Where can I read more?

[renewiltord]

The Goal - Eli Goldratt. The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim.

[AnonC]

After all that, why would you spend $5/month/user on Fastmail when there are even cheaper and good options? Fastmail sticks out like a sore thumb in this solution. Mailbox.org and many others provide good email and web solutions.

[wulfmann]

Plug for: https://www.migadu.com/

[arcturus17]

> and so much more with Github API/webhooks

> shouldn't be spending a dime on anything but the most crucial aspects of what you're building.

So instead you should spend valuable engineering time designing, building, and maintaining your own collaboration tools?

[ramraj07]

Why not do everything in Emacs? I'm sure there's a plugin for everything here in Emacs as well!

Use whatever tool to create the product you want to create.

[the-dude]

You do realize this reads very much like the infamous Dropbox comment?