[patio11]

I spend about $10k a year on SaaS, depending on how you define it. In 2013 I had 175 charges in my accounting software for it.

Prominent expenses and the approximate monthly rates include: Wistia ($100), WPEngine ($250), Sendgrid ($100), 37signals ($100), KissMetrics ($150), and then a large grabbag of sub-$20 SaaSes such as Blinksale, Airbreak, Scout, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc etc.

The smallest SaaS expense: Tarsnap, at $0.60 per month [+]. (Colin, get on the gravy train, you're welcome it it.)

SaaS is a very small portion of my businesses' total expenses. I spend more on hosting and telecomm (largely due to the line of business which is, well, an international telecomm). People are also much more expensive then software, even to the limited extent at which I hire people.

[+] It turns out that a) this had creeped up to $3 per month and b) my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now. grumble grumble picodollars grumble grumble Would happily pay $100 a month to not feel what I'm feeling right now. grumble grumble

[phpnode]

I also spent around 50 cents / month on tarsnap, at this rate my account credit will last another 7.5 years! Colin your service is great, I would pay orders of magnitude more for it, please increase your price so that I don't have to worry about it going away!

[pdb123]

I just checked out tarsnap. It's $0.30/gb/month. I currently do a backup to S3 which is a fraction of the price. I wouldn't mind having another cloud service. Why did you choose tarsnap if it's so expensive.

[patio11]

Many of us are using Tarsnap for actual businesses, where it is criminally underpriced. Among the many reasons to use it over backing up to S3 is that Tarsnap backups are encrypted and the service is written by a domain-expert in that field. Among many other possible scenarios, I use Tarsnap to back up the MySQL and Redis dumps for Appointment Reminder. These include some data which is covered by BAAs which bind me to restrictions on privacy and security under the HIPAA legislation. Just scp'ing them into S3 would be an automatic compliance failure, where I'd pay $600k or so of fines to save $2 a month on Tarsnap.

[phpnode]

At $0.5/month it's pretty cheap in fact. But while the price per picobyte might be higher than AWS, I feel a lot more comfortable using something that has been purpose built for the task by a legitimate genius. The whole point of backup is to be able to sleep at night, I don't want to cut costs here.

[cperciva]

my account was within literally days of running out of funds, which I only found out because I just happened to check now

You would have received an email when your account balance hit 7 days worth of storage costs. And another when it hit zero. And another 7+ days later.

But if you're saying I should have a mechanism for automatically re-billing credit cards when a Tarsnap account balance gets low -- yes, that's on my to-do list.

[xgarland]

Who are you currently for your telecom services? I'm always surprised about the amount of money businesses spend on their phone system.

[patio11]

Mostly it's Twilio costs. I spend an unconscionable amount on my cell phone bill due to e.g. international roaming or international phone calls for sales/support, but that doesn't even crater the approach to the bridge of what Twilio costs me. (And I rush to say "I'm totally fine with that, and wish I spent 100X as much, because to a first approximation that would imply revenues 100X higher than they are currently.")

[guyinblackshirt]

re: cell phone bills, have you thought about getting a raspberry-pi or a larger server running asterisk with chan_dongle, and using a prepaid sim card at each country as your "gsm gateway"(1)?

(1) http://blog.carrier-connect.com/raspberry-gsm-gateway/

[iSloth]

Don't forget one of Patio11's products is almost entirely leveraging telecom services for it's functionality: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/

So I doubt he is just talking about a generic office phone when mentioning teleco services.