Cheaper by the Dozen, not so!!
I recently joined a group of Software Engineers to work on an idea which we all hope, would eventually turn out to be a successful startup. This group is a good mix of Application Developers, Infrastructure Automation Engineers and Devops Engineers. One very interesting aspect of this group is that it is a completely distributed team. Few engineers are in India while few others work from different states in the US. So, soon after starting to work together we started to see problems with setting up all of the tools that each of us have access to at our own work places and expect to be available easily for use. The toolset that I am alluding to includes but not limited to collaboration tools like slack or hipchat, online meeting with audio, video and screen sharing capabilities, project management tools like JIRA, wiki management tool like confluence or share point and the list goes on..So, I took it on me to set up these tools for the entire team. What we ended up with was a good tool set, all of which was procured on cloud using monthly subscriptions. It took a lot of time for me to evaluate various alternatives for each of the tools and I ended up with the ones that either have better reviews, better user interface, better integration with other tools or better pricing model. I thought that several other people with similar requirements must have been going thru the same exact process as I write this story or as you read this story. First I will list all of the tools that I would like to share and then explain the reason for choosing the toolset.
- G Suite
- Slack
- Atlassian Cloud JIRA
- Atlassian Cloud Confluence
- Bitbucket Cloud
- AWS
- Keeper Security
- JumpCloud
I will now explain the reason for choosing each of these tools.
G Suite
Probably the best professional email service available for SMBs. The pricing model for G Suite is a life saver for a small startup. We were able to setup our professional email-id by paying a mere $5 per user per month. This $5 also includes 20GB of Google Drive storage and also includes subscription for meet.google.com service, online meeting tool.
10 Users = $50 / month
11 Users = $55 / month
Slack
Slack is the most preferred IM tool for startup these days and rightfully so. It has a good pricing model which follows three pronged pricing technique. While the basic free plan gave us what we absolutely needed, we ended up purchasing the premium license, I will explain the reasons for doing so at the end.
10 Users = $150 / month
Atlassian Cloud
Atlassian has created an amazing set of tools that every organization either big or small, can fully utilize in order to support every phase of the Application Lifecycle Management. However, Atlassian has a very interesting pricing model for all of its cloud products. Atlassian charges you a flat fee of $10 per service / per month if you have 10 or below users. Which works very well for a startup of size smaller than 10 people. However, starting from the 11th user, Atlassian charges $7 /user/month. So, your monthly bill would go up from $10 to $77 when you add 11th user. So, it actually gets super expensive as you get close to the “DOZEN”. As long as you are below 10, you can use Atlassian Cloud products by paying just $10 per service. I highly recommend this product even if you have users more than 10. The $77 that you are charged is totally worth it.
JIRA
Every project starts of with project planning and there is probably no other tool that comes event remotely close to what JIRA can give you.
10 Users = $10 / month
11 Users = 11 * $7 /user / month = $77
Confluence
Every organization requires a online wiki tool to create documents and share the documents with other people in the organization. Again, I dont think there is any other tool that does as good of a job as confluence. Pricing model for confluence is exactly same as JIRA
10 Users = $10 / month
11 Users = 11 * $7 /user / month = $77
Bitbucket
The very next thing that every developer wants to start is to write code. Every organization will need a centralized code repository. While there are many, I chose Bitbucket Cloud purely because its ‘Bitbucket Pipelines’ feature. I do not have to setup my own continuous integration server because bitbucket provides both SCM and CI features all in one place. Also, it is pretty cheap. If you have a team of less than 5 engineers you pay nothing. You can have unlimited private repositories. Even if you have more than 5, you basically have to pay $2 per user per month which is not too bad.
Pricing for Bitbucket Pipelines is different from the money you pay for user subscription. You will have to pay for the build minutes that you use. Every team gets 50 minutes of free build time. If you run out of those 50 minutes which you will run out in 50 minutes, obviously, your credit card will be charged $10 for every 1000 minutes.
10 Users = $10 / month
11 Users = 11 * $7 /user / month = $77
First 1050 build minutes = $10
Bitbucket also announced “Deployments” in Alpha.
Amazon Web Services
I do not want to pretend that I will write yet another post about the awesomeness of AWS for any startup. Of course, we are starting to see more and more cloud providers are offering similar services at competitive prices, we chose AWS its service catalog is more complete and integration between multiple services is seamless. I would be lying if I promise you folks that we will be running on AWS for the rest of our lives. But that is what we are using right now.
Keeper Security
This is an interesting service that not many people would like to subscribe to at the beginning phases of a startup. This tool offers shared secrets management solution. Shared credentials like database passwords, AWS private keys etc can be elegantly and securely shared with other members on the team with out having to copy paste them in IM tool (Slack). The license is not very expensive when compared to other tools in the market. There is one other strong reason to choose Keeper over other tools that offer similar functionality. You will find the reason while reading about JumpCloud in this post.
10 Users = $300 / year
JumpCloud
I saved the best one for the last. While it is awesome to have all the tools that enable engineers to focus on what they are really required to do in order to build the product, no body wants to remember 10 different logins for 10 different systems. That is where LDAP systems like Active Directory make every ones life easier. JumpCloud is a Directory as a Service solution that gives you the features of a directory service on cloud with monthly pricing. The best part of JumpCloud is that it is completely free for up to 10 users forever. So, if your startup is less than 10 users then you can use JumpCloud’s services all for free for a life time. I used JumpCloud to configure Single Sign On for all of the tools that I have described thus far. Single Sing On made it very convenient for all of the engineers in the group to quickly get to the applications all from JumpCloud’s dashboard. The process of setting up SSO using JumpCloud is not as painful either. I plan on posting more stories detailing how to setup SSO for each service in future. The reason for paying for a premium subscription for Slack is that SSO is only available in paid subscription. Also, reason for choosing KeeperSecurity as the secrets management software is because that is the only out of the box SSO integration available on JumpCloud. Its very weird how humans make decisions, isn't it?
JumpCloud has a very simple and clean interface for logging into all the apps via SSO.
The pricing model for JumpCloud after 10 users is that a minimum of 10 licenses have to be purchased at $10 per user per month. However you get a total of 20 licenses if you pay for 10 licenses. So, pay for 10 users and you will have 20 users.
First 10 Users = Free
11–20 Users = $10 / user / month (min of 10 users)
You can probably imagine by now as to how much of a trouble the 11th member on your team is ;)
