[Alupis]

Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket.

The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage.

The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead.

A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software.

It's not always that clear cut, however.

[infecto]

I think it is fairly clear. If you are building a product of passion that you may tinker with for years, by all means cut costs as much as possible.

If you are an actual early stage venture I don't believe those costs meet a high enough threshold to matter.

[Alupis]

It depends, as things usually do.

$20 here, $10 there, eventually ends up as $600 monthly or more, and no customer anywhere in sight. That may, or may not be sustainable or make sense.

Flush with cash? Knock yourself out. Bootstrapping? You can spend that money a lot more effectively than just loading up on a bunch of overpriced SaaS products to make life easier. You have to earn the easy route by growing your revenue.

[infecto]

It does not depend though. It’s pretty clear that it’s how you value your time which is what I was getting to.

[bdcravens]

This math works if you're not paying salary.