How much does a startup spend on common SaaS each year? Building our 2022 budget, I reviewed all the bills services we use and have used here at Alpe Audio. Here’s the breakdown of how much we spend and on what.
Two notes:
We have five main categories of expenses, overall paying $9460.
Data and User communications is the lion’s share of our annual expenses and we’ll see below which services cost the most. These services’ cost scale with user growth and are most important for understanding and communicating with our users – the lifeblood of our business. They also have lock in which makes it harder to switch and gives them pricing power.
The three key choices for this category are which:
Cloud providers bills also scale with usage, but luckily they offer lots of credits for early day development. Get them!
Mixpanel, Segment and Appsflyer costs all scale with usage, so they get high pretty quickly. Mixpanel and Segment both offer good startup packages, so this has been a long delayed expense, but have to pay the piper at some point! These are critical data tools for us, probably for you as well.
Intercom says it all here. Beast of a use case, but beware of starting to use it because that cost scales FAST. We use Intercom for our in app help desk, notification and onboarding flow & occasional monthly emails.
Nothing fancy to see hear! DNS service, Elementor pro for editing on WP and shoutout.so to share some Twitter love.
Soundstripe, Otter.ai, Descript and OpenAI are all key tools for our audio course creation process at Alpe Audio. Typefully is my primary tool for publishing on Twitter. Every business will have a different stack here.
There are so so many SaaS services used in small startups. We use these on and off on a ‘as needed’ basis. Individually, per month, per user, the pricing works. But the cost rises very quickly if you add users or forget to cancel your subscription, something that many of these companies hope for.
So how much do we spend on SaaS? All in, we’ve been spending at least $10,000 a year on SaaS, and that’s just for one user. These costs scale quickly with additional users and are easy to lose track of. Keep a tight rein on this!