Apps That I Use To Run My Businesses

Here is a list of all of the products and services that I use to run my multiple businesses and consulting practice. This will hopefully give some insight into what we are willing to pay for, either for your own business or maybe new business ideas.

This was inspired by a Pat Walls post from a couple months ago.

SAAS Costs

• Heroku (~$260/month) – I am currently running about 5 apps for this cost.
• Amazon Web Services (~$200/month) – Currently running one business on AWS that is utilizing Lambda and EC2/RDS.
• GSuite Business Accounts (~$36/month) – Have 6 or so email accounts setup.
• Shopify (~$30/month) – Hosting for my wife’s Shopify store.
• Mailchimp ($20/month) – I use this to manage some of my apps mailing lists. Looking to move them all here.
• Serverpilot (~$15/month) + Digital Ocean – (~$24/month) – We use this to host our marketing wordpress sites, separate from the app instances which are on Heroku & AWS.
• Plivo – Proprietary costs so I can’t be exact, but we are paying for phone calls and SMS.
• Twilio – Proprietary costs so I can’t be exact, but we are paying for programmatic SMS.
• Sendgrid (Free Tier) – I use an individual account for each app and use it for transactional emails. The free tier is extremely generous.
• Sentry (Free Tier) – Bug tracking per app, free is more than enough with Heroku addon.
• LogDNA (Free Tier) – Easy to use log management software that breaks up logs per app into one screen.
• Namecheap (~ $250/year) – Yes, I own too many domains
• LeadAide ($50/month) – This is our own software, but we use it internally to follow up on leads
• TailwindUI ($249 one time) – We are integrating Tailwind CSS and UI components into our apps
• Stripe Fees – Transactional fees for processing credit cards
• Upwork ($500 – $1000/month) – We find most of our freelance work through this platform.
• Drift (Free Tier) – Use this for site chat. No idea how it’s free, but thankful it is because Intercom is insanely expensive.

Consulting Costs

• Hello Bonsai (~$20/month) – This app is incredible for keeping all of my consulting operations in one place.
• Quickbooks (~$50/month) – Book keeping for my personal businesses
• Sunsama (~$10/month) – This is the ultimate todo app, integrates with your calendar and lets me manage multiple projects/businesses
• Shift ($99/year) – With so many email and slack accounts this app definitely makes it easier to manage them all.
• Cleanshot ($29 one time) – Crazy powerful app for taking and marking up screenshots
• Convertkit (Free Tier) – I’ve been fortunate enough to stay on their free tier through referrals. Will eventually have to pay.
• Ngrok ($5/month) – I use this to setup subdomains for my Shopify App development which makes app development so much easier.
• Screenflow ($129 one time) – Bought this a while ago but am using it to record courses.

I think this is everything, but will add more if any come to mind.

I’d love to hear your alternatives or recommendations. Send me a msg on twitter. Handle is below 👇