Being a dozen-employee company, we pay more than $1500 for SaaS services
A small calculation turned out that we are now paying more than $1500/mo for all SaaS services we are subscribed to, excluding cloud services, albeit we are a dozen of people working in data analytics domain. This explains why SaaS is booming, software is eating the world (tm), or there is still plenty of room for quality SaaS software, if done right.
In this piece I wanted to write about some of those services, together with honest happy and unhappy moments. There is still a lot more SaaS software we depend on other than the ones listed here, but since they are niche products, I decided to omit them to reduce distraction.
Read on.
Hipchat for internal team communication
We previously used Slack, but due to its first-time on-boarding issues and complexity of the user interface, we switched to Hipchat. Hipchat has a lean pricing ($2/person), and so far, we have been quite happy. There are login issues time to time, although this is quickly communicated to us by Atlassian, it can be annoying. The biggest lacking feature is that there are no group calls — hear us, Atlassian!
- Advantages: Simple and to the point. Affordable pricing.
- Disadvantages: Service is down twice a month.
- Hipchat alternatives: Slack, Mattermost
Join.me for external conference calls
Our sales reps use this for our presentations, especially for demos and solving technical challenges for our customers. We previously used Skype but had performance and stability problems and now we use both Join.me and Google Hangouts. Note that similar video conferencing and live presentation solutions have higher pricing compared to Join.me, so this makes Join.me very attractive for SMBs. While Join.me has provided us one of the best values, if you are a large company you may want to look at other options as well.
Recently Skype introduced group video chats and ability to share screen while on a mobile device — if you still insist on Skype for conference calls.
- Advantages: Flexibility of paid plans, no visible lag, meeting recording facility.
- Disadvantages: Sometimes it takes some time to figure out how to join a screencast.
- Join.me alternatives: Webex, Skype, Google Hangouts
Digital Ocean for quick software testing
We initially used AWS for development and testing instances. A few years ago, a company named Digital Ocean came up with very attractive pricing with $5 per instance, also backed by YCombinator. It was too good to be true, but when we first started trying out their servers, the speed and ease of firing up instances proved that we are on the right track. We are happy to launch hundreds of instances for only $5/mo per instance, for 512MB of RAM, 20GB SSD, 1 CPU, and 1TB transfer — it is in fact the smallest instance that you can run Countly Community Edition on.
While pricing starts from $5/mo and it’s quite fast to create instances (55 seconds), there are several big size options (e.g. 20 cores and 64 GB memory for $640/mo). With the introduction of backups and private networking, DO keeps its simplicity while answering pain points of many developers worldwide. And instance disks are fast. Have a look at this:
Other VMs I use fall in between 50–200 MB/s. Ping times look good, around 100–120ms from my office (Istanbul) to my server in Netherlands.
Contrary to popular belief, DO also provides backup and snapshot facilities with very affordable pricing. Add the automated backup service for 20% of your server cost. If you have a $5/mo server that would run you $1 per month.
Apart from using DO for testing purposes, we recently had a reason to use their API extensively while creating Install Countly to DO button. Try — you’ll love that.
- Advantages: Quick testing with snapshots. Great UI, great price and good performance
- Disadvantages: None we have seen so far.
- Digital Ocean alternatives: Linode, AWS, Vultr
Travis CI for unit tests
For the first year we haven’t really used any CI tools. As Countly got more and more complex (CE being around 150K lines of source code), and with the introduction of unit tests, we needed an automatic way of testing our software. First we built a complete test suite which now includes over 450+ tests. Then we started to inject everything to Travis CI — and started to see where each test passes or fails.
Basically we started to automate everything that we had to do manually, and rather push it to Travis CI’s cloud. The advantage of this automatization is that CI can setup our project in different configurations (e.g Linux distributions or Node.js versions), and get a bird’s eye view of what happens when unit tests are run in different system configurations.
Note that Travis CI also has an open source version for the brave.
- Advantages: Seamless integration with Github and Hipchat. Lean pricing.
- Disadvantages: If there is a a problem, it’s really hard to debug. Server sometimes chokes.
- Travis CI alternatives: Circle CI, Jenkins
Github for code versioning
If you use Git, you probably know Github. Free for open source projects, Github has become one of the defacto standards of code and data hosting. While they have been facing some issues regarding company’s future for some time, Github has been healthy for long enough, raising the company valuation to $2B lately.
Github is good and solid for hosting repositories — but that is it. It doesn’t provide (and we do not expect) much in terms of CI automation and review capabilities. User interface, while it looks fresh, sometimes lacks clarity and users may spend some time for user and document administration. Users have expressed frustrations lately about several points, and wrote a public, open letter to GitHub from the maintainers of open source projects.
We use Github on a professional plan and keep internal issues / discussions there.
- Advantages: Simple and social focused
- Disadvantages: No review capabilities
- Github alternatives: Gitlab, Bitbucket
Jira for issue tracking and non-public discussions
As you may know, Countly has two distinct editions — Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). CE, being open source, needs to be publicly available both in terms of roadmap, discussions and issues, whereas for EE, all this should be handled internally as users do not need to see and know issues related to EE plugins. It would be both time consuming and confusing.
Therefore we keep all Enterprise Edition related issues, discussions and future development ideas in Jira. All inter-company related discussion are also here, including UI fixes, future enhancements and bugs. Every other discussion is handled either on Tenderapp (for community questions & discussions) or Github (for community-related issue tracking).
Before Jira we simply didn’t use any EE related issue tracker. Mostly it was pen-paper relation or using Google Docs ( — and forgetting there was really a Google Docs file for that task. Sigh!).
- Advantages: Lean pricing, well thought out product
- Disadvantages: UI is not simple - more suited to complex projects.
- Jira alternatives: Trello, Redmine
Readme.io for documentation
We first started to build our own documentation page. Everything was on Github, they were pulled on every update, then visualized on Countly web page. We quickly (!) realized that this is not scalable and we needed a proper hosted solution. Then we found out about Readme.io on Producthunt and wanted to try it out. All of our documentation was on Github, and that helped us copy Github pages to Readme.io quickly. There are now more than 250 pages that explains what Countly is all about, both for technical and marketing people :)
- Advantages: Nice backend user interface, drag-drop features
- Disadvantages: Still a lot of issues with left hand navigation, bare minimum customization, no multi-language support, no 3rd level menu items.
- Readme.io alternatives: Apiary, Swagger
Localizejs for web translation
For translating our web page. 4 languages supported as of now (Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and of course, English). We are adding Japanese and those 5 languages will cover most of our user base, with the help of Localizejs. This service helps companies translate their web pages on the fly, by keeping a mapping database of all strings on your web page. By installing a short JS snippet, each string is translated immediately on Localizejs servers and then served to end user.
- Advantages: Simple yet powerful admin user interface.
- Disadvantages: No fuzzy string support — when a character changes, all paragraph should be translated fully by the translator from scratch, unknown strings appear and those should be cleared up time to time, which is time consuming.
- Localizejs alternatives: Bablic, Voog
Transifex for community driven product translation
We have set up our system to automatically upload any new strings to Transifex. This helps us sync all strings back and forth from Github and Transifex — it works quite well and helps us view and analyze everything from a single page. Engine keeps itself running with minimal effort. Therefore Countly now supports 15 languages, and Transifex made this a reality.
Note that it’s not really designed for document translation. If you have long strings, focused on rich formatted content, then Transifex is probably not the best tool out there.
- Advantages: Fuzzy string support and translation memory.
- Disadvantages: User interface still needs some polish — especially the translation dashboard. I still need lots of clicks to complete a translation. I still spend (waste?) some time finding the right place for a certain task.
- Transifex alternatives: Pootle, Crowdin
Mailchimp for sending emails
Sending newsletters is one of the most important monthly tasks of Countly. Each month we have updated documentation, new blog posts about product management and mobile analytics, or product updates and fixes. Countly newsletter now has more than 12.000 subscribers.
We started from a few free users to a quite big list that includes more than a “handful” of fans that get newsletter from Countly every month. Before Mailchimp, we have been sending emails using Gmail until a few users, and then our list started to grow big. Looking at several options, we found out that Mailchimp is way ahead in terms of integration with 3rd party services, features and functionalities.
- Advantages: Simple and easy-to-use, e-mail scheduling.
- Disadvantages: Trying to customize templates can be tricky, drag-and-drop UI has its own issues, pricing is higher compared to rivals.
- Mailchimp alternatives: Sendloop, Mailerlite, Madmimi
Zapier for automation
Zapier is quite a nice automation system for us. In layman terms, it enables you to automate tasks between other online services. I must admit I didn’t clearly understand what Zaiper is all about as I first looked at the web site some time ago.
Basically we use Zapier for a few purposes:
- When a user subscribes to our Cloud it’s subscribed to Intercom also. Zapier uses this information to subscribe the same user to Mailchimp.
- If a new user is subscribed to Countly, then we immediately get an email of that user.
What we also like is that Zapier has introduced multi-step zaps. That means, you can chain as many Actions as you want to a single Trigger.
- Advantages: User interface is superb, learning Zapier is quite straightforward and easy despite the complexity of the underlying idea.
- Disadvantages: Some of the integrations can be tricky depending on the service.
- Zapier alternatives: Tray.io, Hoist
Intercom for drip marketing
Intercom is a customer platform with a suite of products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support. Launched in 2012, Intercom has changed — or help change — the way customers are contacted. They bring many customer related communication channels into one application and try to centeralize acquisition, automation and re-engagement. We have been using Intercom for drip marketing starting from early days of Countly, and apart from a few issues it has worked well for us. One thing that has annoyed us was the lack of using segmentation and ability to drill down users based on a segmentation. In another case, I tried to remove users but the system kept me for an hour before seeing the real data again on dashboard.
For those who are interested in having customer data in place, and send them drip marketing emails, there are plenty of choices, including Vero, Drift and Customer.io. By time, gap between services feature-wise is narrowing more and more and while there is no perfect solution, I am sure one of the services I mentioned here can be a good alternative for a single-point customer marketing platform.
- Advantages: Simple to use, lean pricing
- Disadvantages: Pricing method has drastically changed from number of users tracked per month to number of users stored in a month. If you are planning to use Intercom for a long term, you may come up with another price change which can affect you depending on your business model.
- Intercom alternatives: Drift, Customer.io
Happyfoxchat for online chat with users
After using another chat system for over a year, I thought there is something “fishy” with the call to action button of the service. It simply didn’t stood out from the crowdness of the page, and I felt like it was hidden behind all those phrases and illustrations. Looking for a service around, I came by HappyFoxChat, which had a clear, actionable button saying “Click me” — and it didn’t prove me wrong. We started to use HappyFoxChat and our conversion increased by at least 200%.
- Advantages: Simple tool for online and 1–1 customer support. Good for managing more than one customer at the same time.
- Disadvantages: None so far.
- Happyfoxchat alternatives: Zopim, Userlike
Tenderapp for community support
Many companies separate community support with their paid product. This gives a lift and consideration for community to pay for features and get necessary support, and a means for commitment and adherence to SLAs and deadlines for paid (e.g enterprise / business) product.
From the initial start, we also had been doing the same — separating community support from the support we give to enterprise customers. Since we are a B2B company, this required us to sign annual agreements with customers, including banks, financial institutions (e.g credit & risk) and telecom operators where terms included fines and strict SLAs. Enterprise customers always come with demands and you cannot “kindly ask” them to use a specific product (e.g a forum software) to login and enter their question and wait for an answer. They want to make a direct phone call or ask via email. This is why we cannot (and do not) use Tenderapp for enterprise customers. It just doesn’t make sense.
- Advantages: Free for open source projects, paid for enterprise.
- Disadvantages: No problems encountered but lacks a good UI — product hasn’t been updated for quite a long time.
- Tenderapp alternatives: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Desk
A few closing remarks
I’ve used hundreds of SaaS services in my life, and have brought a few of them to life. For the last 10 years, I have compiled some straightforward but critical questions to assess services.
I’m pretty sure there are several other guides out, and this could be a concise starting point for you.
- Do they have a clear roadmap? If you find a feature is lacking, do you think you can talk to company so they can stretch their upcoming feature list?
- Is the product highly customizable for your needs?
- Does company have an active blog page? (an indication of health)
- Is dashboard accessible via mobile browser?
- What are the payment terms? monthly or annual?
- What are SLA (service level agreement) terms?
- Having top notch support that you can rely on is mandatory for all critical services you use. Check if the service has an outstanding support.
- Are there any SPoFs (single point of failure)? That’s a tough question, but worth asking.
- Can you trust this company? Are they small or backed by a big company / VC ?
- Who has access to your data, and how? What are employee’s rights to access data?
