I always enjoy seeing which products founders use so I thought I'd share the ones I use, what I use them for, and how much they cost.
Subscriptions
I use DigitalOcean to host all of my products (which are mostly built with Django). I also use their "volume storage" product. I've hosted with AWS before, but found DigitalOcean way easier to use and manage.
Across my products, this currently costs $295 per month, but that should be decreasing in coming months wind down some more resource intensive products.
I've been a Buffer customer for many years and mainly use their API to automatically schedule posts for the Screenlane Twitter account. The API doesn't seem to be a priority for them so I'm open to switching, but there doesn't seem to be any solid alternatives for the price and it still works for me.
$10 per month
I use Calendly to make it easy for people to book meetings with me. I mostly needed this for the "Book a demo" flow for Screenjar. I could have probably got away with the free plan, but decided to upgrade at some point.
$8 per month (I got the yearly plan at $96)
Transactional emails (password resets emails etc). One of my favourite products - easy to navigate & set up, great company, and super reasonable pricing.
$10 per month
Also transactional email. I probably need to cancel this and move a couple projects over to Postmark.
$14.95 per month
This is a URL to image API which I use to automatically take screenshots of emails for Page Flows (emails sent as part of a user flow are captured. You can see an example at the bottom of this page)
$29 per month
This is used to process images, automatically create thumbnails of uploaded images etc. I'll likely stop using this soon as I'm winding down most of the products I used it for.
~$50 per month
I just stated using this to send all of my newsletters.
~$100 per month
Google Workspace or G-Suite or whatever it's called these days
I use this to create email accounts with custom domains mainly. I hate it.
~$15 per month
I made the landing page for Metapine with this. Great tool.
$1.58 per month!!! ($19 per year)
Others
Some other bits and bobs the business has paid for reasonably recently
I use Stripe to handle payments and they take a cut of revenue for that.
A simple, practical book on UI design. This has come in handy a few times and I use some of the icons that came with it on.
$149
Says it in the name. A course and a community for founders who want to learn sales. I still get involved in the community from time to time.
~$200
A course about creating profitable newsletters. I'll be honest, I haven't gone through any of this yet.
$99
A newsletter which shares ideas for software businesses (cancelled subscription).
$19 per month
Another newsletter which shares ideas for software businesses (cancelled subscription).
~$6 per month ($70 per year)
Accountant
Super happy to pay for this, highly recommended.
~$100 per month
Experimented with some ads, didn't really get anywhere with it.
~$50
For recording gifs (mainly for Screenlane)
~$8
Free products
I'd likely pay for these if I had to and there were no free alternatives.
CDN, caching, protection from DDOS attacks etc
I use both of these for video meetings
I also use Notion sometimes, but mostly default to using the Apple notes app.
That's actually more than I expected. If you have any questions about any of these, whether I'd recommend them etc, let me know.
Dec. 2, 2020