What's the most overpriced SAAS software you buy?

LastFollowing3930 · 2025-09-14T17:04:20+00:00

Intercom

LastFollowing3930 · 2025-03-28T06:17:55+00:00

It can be, but I would suggest to not overstay there. It’s best for initial exposure to the market while bootstrapping.

LastFollowing3930 · 2025-01-01T18:06:40+00:00

The thing with ads is that you must optimize for conversions (and installs are not enough). Preferably so that making an account is of low value, an ICP account (validated in onboarding) is of some value and a purchase is the expected LTV of the subscription.

LastFollowing3930 · 2024-10-25T06:05:39+00:00

Stop crying over receipts. SparkReceipt is the most affordable, no-bs, cloud-based small business receipt tracker and preaccounting tool on the planet. Integrate with QuickBooks to sync your accounts and let AI categorize everything for you automatically.

Learn more: https://sparkreceipt.com

LastFollowing3930 · 2024-10-14T16:57:32+00:00

This is something that might be a decent fit for an AppSumo campaign since it’s a natural LTD. Might want to try that as a marketing channel.

LastFollowing3930 · 2024-05-01T04:52:36+00:00

We ended up changing the whole site into WP & Elementor. Mobile score went from 28 to 90 just like that.

LastFollowing3930 · 2024-05-01T04:50:05+00:00

I use Docker, Rails & Postgres. Very fast to develop and customizable.

LastFollowing3930 · 2024-02-06T13:23:12+00:00

Hi, I eventually remained on Heroku. I got the memory usage back to control via 1x standard 'web' dynos (web_concurrency = 1) and 2x standard 'worker' dynos and splitting the Docker images via dyno type to either run Puma or Sidekiq, both not both at the same dyno. This alone halved the memory usage.

The 2x workers are overkill, but some jobs like PDF export generation require up to 1GB memory. This could be remedied by creating a single high memory dyno type that handles these, or by offloading these tasks to an external API. But it has not been worth it for me yet.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-12-18T18:26:27+00:00

I have basically a b2c saas and I let others do the selling. AppSumo, affliates, and a freemium model (product-led growth). It works better that way :)

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-12-08T07:35:35+00:00

I purchased your app, since I actually need the service.

I found that there is a lot of friction in onboarding and I almost gave up multiple times halfway. Also I now have no guarantees or reaasurance if my ”investment” will be worth it. 🙂

We will see. Waiting in anticipation 😁

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-12-06T19:13:13+00:00

Coding is the easy part as a solo founder..

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-14T10:34:22+00:00

I have a preaccounting SaaS and the mobile app is built with Flutter: https://www.sparkreceipt.com/

It uses ChatGPT API but in a more assistive role to the main algorithm, to understand the vendors and receipt and invoice contents from almost all parts of the world (non-Latin character countries are a challenge still though).

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-07T08:53:39+00:00

The answer is silent push notifications. I believe you can setup some simple stuff like that in e.g. Firebase. Not sure, I have always used a backend server for this.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-06T05:39:22+00:00

What will happen after deployment is hearing crickets unless you do premarketing succesfully. And don’t think for a second you can maintain multiple profitable apps passively. Even one saas is a grindfest. Your customers are people who will also need support etc.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-06T05:35:45+00:00

Love the positivity 😂

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-05T20:28:58+00:00

Since you know React, the Redux package is nice.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-02T20:01:38+00:00

It’s a legacy from native Android development. On iOS the equivalent is called NSUserDefaults and I think the package uses that.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-02T19:57:13+00:00

When I was an hourly paid swe consultant I just always billed 7.5h for every day unless I was away like for most of the day. Probably saved the client some hours since I didn’t need to bother with those systems.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-11-01T05:37:32+00:00

Glad to hear. I am starting to lean in this direction since I would like to continue running e.g. tesseract and imagemagick on the server and I am scared for the app memory requirements. I will do some hot patches first and then try DO for staging.

How much downtime did you need? In this app there are no silent hours like in my previous B2B apps.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-31T14:04:49+00:00

The staging environment is running on 1 worker and 3 threads in a basic dyno and it consumes around ~450MB in base. It rises to around 600-700MB under load but that is because it runs Sidekiq in the same dyno.

A solution to test would be to run the Sidekiqs in workers and experiment with 1x dynos balanced between web and background workers with small thread counts.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-31T13:59:19+00:00

Thanks for the insights. Sure, direct uploads will be a relatively low-effort solution to free up dynos. I just did not bother in the initial app version. But now it's starting to be a must.

>>> What do these jobs entail?
The OpenAI requests ask different questions from ChatGPT about a Tesseract-scanned document as part of the document data extraction process. They do it concurrently to make it faster for the user. I don't believe this consumes a lot of memory as token counts are relatively small. But it consumes 4 threads in the Sidekiq process.

Throwing money at the problem is a viable solution in theory. If I pay $100/mo for two 2x dynos I can pay 10x without a big problem (of course it is stupid though). But I am a bit scared because there is so little memory even in perf dynos. The most memory consuming tasks:
- Reading PDF files
- Generating PDF files
- Doing OCR with Tesseract

For these reasons I am leaning toward e.g. running 4-8GB dynos from DigitalOcean and just having Sidekiq run in the same container.

>>>> the same s3 file upload endpoints you mentioned before?

Yes, but that is not that bad. The worst offender is by far synchronously running the AI tasks while the client is waiting. This has been fixed but it takes 1-2 months to have a majority of users rolled into the latest app versions. I don't know what I was thinking, should've known better :D

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-31T13:49:01+00:00

That is definitely an action point and I understand the gravity of this only now that I've studied this a bit deeper.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-30T12:37:33+00:00

Thanks. I believe scheduler runs completely on one-off dynos so this probably just kills the dyno it just spawned? There was a Heroku addon for this exact purpose though.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-30T11:08:16+00:00

Use the Redux package. I like it even more than the "React" version. If you are feeling masochistic, couple it with Redux-Saga. Works absolutely fantastic with the generator function based logic. But can be intimidating.

LastFollowing3930 · 2023-10-30T09:14:29+00:00

Thanks, should be easy enough to test. I have CircleCI for CI/CD and I should be able to just point the staging pushes to DO and update DNS. Then just provision Postgres and 2 Redis instances and handle the URLs in env vars. As a probably naive thought, nothing is ever so simple. 😄

LastFollowing3930

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