Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Running a business is much, much more expensive than you'd expect if you've never done it before. I started one on $60 so I get the mindset which has people suggesting that this story represents prolifigate spending, but oh my goodness, it's practically a shoestring.

There is an individual thing in the AR deployment which exists for no technical purpose to get us a piece of paper issued by Rackspace which we need for legal reasons. That thing costs more than everything on this page combined. We have one part-time employee; she's 3X more expensive than that thing.

If you're put off by $80 for a database wait until you get quoted rent, insurance, taxes, accounting fees, any engagement with a professional, review of a customer's MSA to sell them an enterprise contract, healthcare for a single person, travel to a single conference, the wifi at the hotel for a single conference, etc etc.

Also: there is virtually no scenario under which a SaaS app grossing $Xk per month has a better financial or technical outcome by working on minimizing expenses when you could be working on selling more accounts and selling better accounts.

I have to strongly disagree with you. I run my own online thing and find that keeping expenses down has given me a huge competitive advantage over similar sites.

I would also stress that there are other reasons to keep complexity down, like hating to do paperwork (or work of any kind).

Ha, I totally hear you on the second one. There are a number of situations where I've chosen to do something in-house rather than using one of these vendors, partially because I prefer to spend time managing the technical solution over (admittedly much less time :) ) handling the paperwork of one more vendor.

Of course, it's also just my natural inclination. My common response to problems is more along the lines of, "I can write a script to do this," than, "I bet there's a SaaS for this." That may well be inefficient, but it's how I roll.

The peak spending in the graph is about $1300 for the month. This is barely more than one single employee's salary if they're on the US federal minimum wage ($7.25 x 40 hours x 4 weeks = $1160), and that's before you have to pay the employee overheads. It then settles down to around half this amount.

For a company with multiple employees, this really is peanuts. If you can do better, that's great, but it's not the standard experience in business.

What's more remarkable is the number of services and integrations that are necessary to keep a SaaS product running. Even on a shoestring budget, that's a lot of complexity to manage.

More than the cost, the micro-integration hell that you start to get into and out of (when swapping out) can be a real slow down to building and shipping features

I am sorry but what is AR deployment?

Appointment Reminder deployment, i.e. deploying one of the SAAS websites Patrick owns

Yep. n.b. "deployment" is another word for "the production environment considered as a system." (For the first few years I would have said "server" but these days it is a wee bit more complicated.)

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