I generally agree, but I'd say it depends. I'm not too surprised that software developers are less likely to spend money on software - they do have another option non-programmers don't have. I'd also not be shocked to hear that trained accountants starting a company are less likely to hire accounting firms than non-accountants.

And most software I deal with isn't exactly free of opportunity cost - I dabbled a bit with accounting tools to the point of frustration and time sunk that I decided to roll my own (built around ledger, in case anyone cares) in about a day. Writing my own tool is sometimes faster for me than trying to figure out how to use one that's not designed around my specific needs.

Sure, 10$ doesn't seem like much, but all these little invoices can creep up to a non-trivial sum.

Yes, but shouldn't I be making more even money by using these services to optimize those other things? If, say, Calendly helps me get booked for appointments, appointments that wouldn't have happened without that app, then isn't that spending money to make money?

If you think so, it's probably true. That's why I can't really disagree with parent :D

I find the cost and value of tooling options quite difficult to fully grasp, it often comes down to gut feeling IMO.

What I would want to caution folks for is that the cost of a tool is not only what it actually costs. It's also the amount of time that has to be invested into usage, and potentially migrating to something else a while down the line in case of discontinuation, disappearing capabilities, new requirements, ToS or pricing changes, ...

Is it bending backwards though? The problem is that saas solutions scale in cost as well, so when you grow you pay more. For a small startup, there is always a cut off where the price of the saas service(s) explode well over the utility but you are hooked and you can afford it now. But should you? Personally I enjoy profits and more profits are better. I cannot accept using tools that I don’t really need, but, at success time, I cannot really get rid off anymore easily. And then suddenly that $10/mo is $23k/mo and I knew that when I integrated it in the first place, but thought it will save me 2 hours per year. And the new price utility is not suddenly saving me 100 or more hours a year; more like 4 hours.

I don’t doubt it’s possible, but I would love an example of a Saas product that successfully scales pricing from $10/m to $23,000/m on customer segments that aren’t enterprise-scale and has the kind of lock-in you describe.

I ask because I would like to quit my job and build a competitor ASAP.

Also, the problem isn’t the potential cost down the road. If you’re scaling on any Saas product to the $23k/m tier, then congrats, you’ve made it!

The problem is, there’s a 90%+ chance all your cost optimizing upfront was a giant waste of time, because a vast majority of startups don’t work out. And the ones that do often pivot.

That doesn't apply when the cost is static (adhering to the above advice of dumping 1P).

I don’t understand what you mean by static in this context. 1Password costs more when you have more employees.

Two things: the first is that it's easier to estimate costs with services like 1P due to it being mostly static, unlike other services where costs are quite dynamic ranging from different factors like usage and hours spent. The second is that once you reach that scale (more than 10 members), your costs are so large on personnel alone that $10/person is an absurdity to be frugal about when it can save you time.

If you have employees, you’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for them. Paying an extra $10/m to save 2 hours of their time is still a profitable trade.

I think others have addressed your comment well, but I'll add my 2c:

I think it's more about minimising the cost with effective alternatives rather than just taking whatever the "brand name VC startup/scaleup" is in the space and forking over hundreds of dollars.

You will more likely always have to spend money to make money, I agree. But if starting from nothing, having an immediate -$200/month (up to $500+ once the free credits run out) before you actually make any money does not sound like a good time.

Also take into account when running multiple such projects. Survivorship bias in our space is real, and it takes a lot of hits to "make it big". That can easily pile up to thousands for a handful of projects while none of them get near break-even before you go bankrupt.

All it takes is finding a good-enough alternative in the space, or if you trust the software enough to self-host, do that.

There's nothing wrong with actually trying to be frugal. We're supposed to have the skills to be more self-sufficient in this space, and I don't think it's a negative to want to actually do so. And neither is paying for something if you feel the premium is worth it.

It depends a lot on your time and experience... Also, what you want to know. There's no guarantees at all with a SaaS startup, and if you can increase your knowledge base at a minimal time sink it may be worth it. I have a dozen things I tinker with and no expectations, so I treat it more as a hobby.

I am spending about $140/mo on a dedicated server currently, mostly because I want to run my own mail server without depending on a relay host or nickel and dime costs ($2-10/mo per address). This now runs just about everything I use. Nearly all my apps are dockerized so I can port them to another host pretty easily.

I've also been playing with writing for Cloudflare directly (workers & pages) as well as CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud). Both with relatively low startup pricing and can grow as needed based on usage/demand, both with a relatively clean self-host strategy as an exit.

It would be too easy for me to wind up paying $20-30/month or more on a dozen or more projects. I try to keep this down, as if I don't touch something for a month, or don't complete it for a year, it adds up quick... If I keep baseline costs low, it's less of an issue.

If I was 20 years younger, I'd probably have gotten more of these things done or put more effort in. The tech costs are a lot better today than 25-30 years ago when I was starting out. But I'm still pretty mindful of it.

I think it’s just because it’s described as “frugal”.

That's just being nice. We developers are a right bunch of cheap bastards. At least I am. I'm working on it, but it's just so ingrained and pervasive, it's weird. I've been trying to figure out where it comes from for a while now, and how to get people to work past it, with little success.

If there was a magic debugger that made debugging 100x easier and faster, but it wasn't free and open source, I'd still have a hard time using it even though it would save me a bunch of time, and easily pay for itself in time and frustration saved.

I take frugal to mean being smart or conservative with spending. However, optimizing to the extent some people are talking about here would redefine the term to mean "irrational" for me.

In the context of a business, nearly any piece of software is a trivial cost compared to hiring a human (or yourself) to do a task.

The Einstein quote is as applicable as ever: "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

The issue has less to do with not spending on software when your starting a software startup that it does the use of the term Frugal.

That implies bare minimum spend not splurge-in-just-a-few-areas cost to time savings benefit analysis.

> Does nobody here see the irony in bending over backwards to avoid spending money on software products when the entire purpose of your business is to sell a software product?

No, because nobody thinks that it'll happen to them. Their company's/startup's/side project's product will be worth paying money for, and surely nobody's going to try to start an open-source product that will compete with them.

It's always somebody else.

Pay more, no matter how unreasonable it is because you can afford it. You’re living in the US bubble, where VC funded startups feed each other in often unsustainable ways. People were taught this argument to keep the wheel spinning.

The right way to build a startup is: offload your infra, self host everything you can while balancing the maintenance effort/cost.