How a 2 person startup already uses 26 other tools
At Across, we wanted to see how many other technology companies and service providers we use on a regular basis. The answer was way more than we thought. For a seed stage 2 person startup, we already use 26 different tools regularly totaling $174 / month (we’re on the free plans for many of them). And, this excludes libraries in our product. It’s self-inflicted, but a lot of tools nonetheless.
I’m sure this number will grow as we hire employees and have to buy HR and IT software as well (and I’m sure I forgot a few existing tools on this list). We’re interested to hear what other startup stacks look like!
Productivity & Project Management
- GSuite ($12 / month) — Standard email, file storage in Drive, analysis in Sheets, and presentations in Slides
- Slack ($13 / month) — Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels
- Airtable (free) — CRM to track our sales funnel
- Notion ($16 / month) — Storing interview notes, brainstorming product and feature ideas
Development
5. GitHub ($7 / month) — Version control / source management
6. Trello (free) — Product roadmap, issue tracking
7. Landen (free) — No code landing page creator
8. Miscellaneous IDEs (free) — Sublime, Vim
9. Robo 3T (free) — MongoDB GUI
Analytics
10. Mixpanel (free) — Front and backend analytics. We are on a startup plan so receive Mixpanel for free for up to 250K MTUs
11. Sentry ($26 / month) — Error logging and reporting
12. Fullstory (free) — Session replay. We are on a startup plan so receive Fullstory for free.
Payments, Hosting & Authentication
13. Stripe (pricing depends on volume) — Accepting payments
14. Heroku (free) — Hosting. We are still using free dynos
15. Firebase (free) — Authentication. We are still on the free plan
16. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — CDN + DNS.
Sales & Marketing, Customer Support
17. Hubspot ($45 per month) — Email outreach and contact management. We are on the Startup plan so receive Hubspot 90% off.
18. Drift (free) — Chat widget on our website. We’ve stuck with the basic free plan.
19. Mailchimp (free) — Automated emails on signups
20. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) — Finding leads to contact
21. Zoom (free) — Web conferencing
22. Twilio (pricing depends on volume) — Business phone number, used in conjunction with FounderPhone
23. Boomerang (free) — Reminders to follow up with people in email
24. FounderPhone (free) — Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)
25. Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Discord — Use these channels to communicate with customers
Finance & Legal
26. Brex (free) — Business cash account and credit cards. Free until we scale.
We’re interested to hear what other startup stacks look like!
