[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.

[localcdn]

Ahh, that is a nice and unexpected bonus. Does “Sign in with Google” allow provisioning of new accounts with appropriate permissions for a service/SaaS by an admin? (I’ve only used OneLogin/Okta)