I’m always fascinated by how companies spend money on software, especially since we sell a SaaS product ourselves, Muck Rack. Software-as-a-service makes it immeasurably easier to run a startup today compared to just a few years ago, where many functions would have to be done with custom solutions, or with purchased software hosted on our servers. It occurred to me there’s one company whose SaaS spending we could analyze — our own.
We’re sharing our spending here in hopes it’ll be useful for other startups that use and or sell online software. We also hope this’ll inspire more startups to share their SaaS budgets, similar to how Betaworks is encouraging people to share their phones’ homescreens.
Below is a list of what we’re spending a month for every SaaS service based on actual October numbers. In cases where we pay annually, the monthly equivalent is shown. I’ve excluded pure hosting (Amazon, Linode, etc.), but included email service providers like MailChimp. I’ve also excluded software we use for free, such as Google Apps for Work.
To give you an idea of our scale, our company has ten employees in our NYC headquarters, and about a dozen people working for us remotely worldwide. In addition to Muck Rack, which is a PR and journalism platform, we also run the Shorty Awards, for which we bring on a big seasonal team. We’ve never taken institutional funding and operate profitably (despite spending all this money on SaaS!). We’re hiring too!
Without further ado, here’s what we spend monthly:
Boomerang $78.16 - Gmail follow up reminder plugin
Browserstack $138.00 - Cross-browser and mobile testing of design and front-end code
CircleCI $49.00 - Automated build and tests
Clicky $13.33 - Stats tracking
Dead Man’s Snitch $19.00 - Monitors cron jobs
Docraptor $75.00 - Generates Excel and PDF docs
Dropbox $165.00 - Team file sharing
Embedly $867.00 - Embed and extract elements from web pages
Expensify $13.50 - Expense tracking
Flowdock $78.39 - Team chat
Trello $38.11 - Organizes projects
Fullcontact $99.00 - Contact information API
Github $97.00 - Git repository hosting
Hootsuite $79.99 - Social media account management
Intercom $339.70 - Customer service and automation
Intuit Quickbooks Online $43.50 - Accounting
Join.me $77.06 - Remote meetings
Mailchimp $517.50 - Email lists
Mailgun $49.96 - Programmatic/transactional emails
Mixpanel $350.00 - Statistics tracking
Moz $99.00 - SEO software
New Relic $381.06 - Server and performance monitoring
Invision $25.00 - Sharing and commenting on designs
Olark $66.00 - Sales chat
Postmark $300.00 - Programmatic emails
Recurly $104.70 - Credit card processing and recurring billing (grandfathered price, amount excludes credit card fees)
Rowfeeder $5.00 - Twitter tracking (grandfathered price)
Screenhero $9.99 - Remote screen sharing and collaboration
Sentry $49.00 - Error and exception tracking
Shopify $63.00 - Ecommerce stores
Streak $227.69 - Sales
Tripit $4.08 - Travel monitoring
Typekit $8.33 - Web font embedding
Vimeo Plus $10.84 - Video hosting
Wufoo $69.95 - Form hosting
Zapier $49.00 - Task automation
Total: $4,660.84 monthly ($55,930.08 annually)
Some of the items above, such as Docraptor and Embedly, address specific needs of our apps, and won’t apply to other startups, but the majority of items address function common to all tech startups, like project management, collaboration, file sharing, or credit card processing.
We encourage other companies to share their SaaS budgets and would love to see what software or apps you recommend. Let us know if you share yours, and feel free to send it to us if you’d like us to publish it anonymously.
(photo via)