10 services pragmatic makers should know about ⚡🚢️
Update: I published this list and many more services in a public Github repository. Check it out! — Link
Hello! 👋 I am Julien, an independent maker.
I realized one of the things I prefer in shipping is thinking about the best services I can plug together to deliver value without a single line of code. Don’t get me wrong, I was taught to be a developer and I love to code, but to me, the code is perfect when there’s no code at all. No code means no time needed to maintain it, and usually using services instead of code is way faster.
“Code is perfect when there’s no code at all”
Using services instead of code means :
- An entire team of experienced developers is taking care of the code running the services.
- If the idea is popular and lift off, scalability will usually cost money, not time.
- Giving life to ideas will be faster
- Coding creates an emotional bond to the code base because a lot of time was spent on it. It won’t be as strong using services.
That’s why I decided to gather in this post ten of the best services I like to use when I bootstrap ideas. Enjoy ! ✌️
Algolia — Search engine
Algolia is a fully featured search-as-you-type engine. It provides very fast results. It replaces the need for setting up elastic search.
Features
- Search handles typos, synonyms etc
- Apply custom rankings to results (for example use number of votes as a ranking criterion)
- Filter and sort exactly as needed
- <100ms response time, it’s awesomely fast
Getting started
Create an index on the dashboard. This will create an index key. Then install the SDK. Finally get the search and admin keys from algolia’s website and use them to search from or push data to the index.
Limits
The free plan is limited to 10k records and 100k operations (one operation is roughly a modification on an element, such as a new object pushed to an index).
As you may have noticed, there’s no limit on read operations, and this is huge. It means your app popularity could skyrocket, as long as you don’t touch the indexes, it will remain free.
Netlify — Static website hosting
Netlify is a Content Delivery Network whose main feature is to host and serve static websites. It’s the best because it’s astonishingly easy to set up.
Features
- Serves static websites
- There is an API to trigger deploys programmatically
- Bonus: Now you can add functions to Netlify, like what serverless provides
Getting started
From Netlify’s dashboard, bind a repository (github, bitbucket or gitlab), specify a build command and validate — One minute later the website will be live.
To bind a custom domain, just create the suggested records on your DNS and that’s it.
Limits
As weird as it sounds, there is actually no limit to netlify hosting service. It’s just free and unlimited.
The API usage is limited to 3 deploys per minutes which is quite a lot ! It means you could update your website more than 4000 times a day for free.
EDIT : Netlify is actually virtually unlimited as the limit is 100GB of bandwidth per month, which is a lot for static files.
Contentful — CMS for developers
Contentful is a Content Management System as a service which has been designed to be easy to integrate by a developer.
Features
- Slick interface to manage the data
- Easy to use API to query and update the data
Getting started
Create a content model to describe the shape of your data. Then add data and that’s it, nothing special besides the fact that the user interface is great.
Limits
The free tier is limited to 5000 records and 24 content types which is more than enough for most apps. No limits on the API usage besides the fair-use policy (78 requests per second for delivery, 10 requests per second for management) which is pretty awesome.
Cloudinary — Hosting for images
Cloudinary is a place to store and serve all your images. It’s really handy as it is possible to transform (resize for example) images directly from a GET request.
Features
- Transform images with URL parameters (size, type, quality etc)
- Also supports videos
- Integrates easily in many frameworks (React, Vue etc)
Getting started
Upload some images, copy the provided ID. Then use the cloudinary SDK and paste the asset id, specify some transformations and that’s it.
Limits
Cloudinary is actually not as generous as it could be. The free tier includes 25 credits. Each credit is worth either 1000 transformations, 1GB of storage or 1 GB of viewing bandwidth.
Even with a small project, it’s quite easy to reach these limits, especially the bandwidth. The cheapest pricing tier is $99/month, very expensive after all for a side project.
Crisp Chat — Chat with visitors
Crisp Chat is like Intercom, but free.
Features
- Displays a chatbox to interact with visitors
- Visitors can enter an email address to enable email follow-ups
- Real-time analytics included
Getting started
Crips chat gives a script tag to copy/paste to an HTML page, nothing more.
Limits
It’s completely free. Some additional options and history of messages can be unlocked by paying a monthly fee.
Zapier — Plumb services together
Zapier is a service to bind other services together. It leverages webhooks and APIs to create workflows between services.
Features
- More than 1000 apps supported
- Handles developer specific endpoints (webhooks, send email etc)
Getting started
Zapier’s interface is pretty straightforward. They guide the user very efficiently towards the setup of workflows (called zaps).
Limits
Zapier’s pricing is not friendly, you can set up only five workflows of maximum two steps for free, the next tier is quite expensive for a bootstrap project: $20 per month. But it could still be useful for a bootstrapped project as workflow executions are free.
Notice that workflow execution can be delayed by a few minutes, it should not be used for time-critical tasks !
Stripe — Payments made easy
Stripe is the most known payment processor for the web. It’s focused on being easy to integrate by a developer.
Features
- Handles one-time payment as well as recurring payments
- Handles developer specific endpoints (webhooks, send email etc)
Getting started
Stripe is maybe a bit harder to set up than the other services—probably because it deals with money. Learning about Stripe Elements is a good way to get started though.
Limits
Stripe has no limits as it takes a commission on every transaction. It depends on your currency but it’s about 3% + $0.25 per transaction.
Airtable — Flexible spreadsheets
Airtable is a database as a service providing a spreadsheet-like interface. It’s a breath to integrate compared to Google Spreadsheets for example.
Features
- API very easy to integrate
- Lots of pre-configured templates for common use cases
Getting started
Very straightforward as the interface is a spreadsheet.
Limits
Free up to 1,200 records for a single project which is quite comfortable.
Unsplash — Beautiful images
Unsplash is a directory of thousands beautiful and free to use photos. It also provides an easy-to-use API for developers.
Features
- API very easy to integrate
- Possibility to get random images based on a given theme
Getting started
Using the API requires to register an app which is a way for Unsplash to check that you are not illegally selling their photos. It’s a pretty straightforward process.
Limits
Completely free !
Heroku — Server code runner
Heroku has been around for quite some time but is still a very useful service. After pushing some code to their git system, Heroku detects the language and framework used and deploys a server accordingly to run it.
It’s a very fast way to get backend code up and running.
Features
- Runs code for almost every programming languages
- A plugin ecosystem provides lots of additional functionalities like database, emails, analytics…
- No server management or scaling, Heroku does all of this by itself
Getting started
Create a project, push some code and that’s it.
Limits
Heroku provides 1000 hours per month for free which is enough for many apps. With the free tier though, the server will sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and it takes more than a minute to wake it up. That’s something to keep in mind.
The next tier is quite cheap, $7 per month.
Conclusion
This post is just the tip of the iceberg as there are numerous other very useful services out there that help to build features (talkjs, getform…). I also think most readers already knew some of these services and that’s okay.
This blog post was a success if at least one service was not known to you !
Final words
Thanks for reading I hope you liked it and if you did, please follow me or drop me a message to keep in touch ☕✌️.
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