| Specifically for software as a service, we now spend nothing, for any of my businesses. We do outsource various infrastructure things to specialists. Hosting and payment collection are the two largest categories. However, our experience has been that every time we've considered SaaS, it comes down to a balance something like this: Pros: - Saves time. - Offers a tried and tested solution to some problem. Cons: - Requires effort up-front to integrate it. - Requires effort up-front to customize it to fit our needs as well as it can. - Such customization isn't always possible. - We're allergic to lock-in, and we've seen goalposts moved after our money has been taken in the past. - May have deal-breaking privacy/security implications. - Has ongoing costs, which may or may not scale favourably as we grow. The only areas that tip towards SaaS on that balance for any of our projects tend to be very simple tasks that require negligible effort to integrate or customize, involve no data that is highly sensitive or valuable, and are expendable without causing noticeable harm to our business while we make other arrangements. In other words, they're things where the cons don't really apply because it's not big or important enough to worry about them. Most of those are readily available as someone's free plan anyway at the kinds of scales we're talking about here. For anything more important than that, we've found that doing things manually at first soon shows up which areas will most benefit from automation for any given project, and we tend to automate heavily once a need becomes clear. We just do it the old-fashioned way using scripting, spreadsheets, and various other software tools that have proven helpful. |