This somewhat short post lists the software that a small three-member startup says that it happily pays for. There are eight services that total up to USD 171 a month, or a little over two thousand dollars a year.
When you’re an early-stage company, your biggest cost is your opportunity cost of time. Above all else. You can buy yourself that time quite profitably with well designed, highly available software.
I’ve seen – and experienced – a lot of startups that look to conserve money in their early days by either looking to build out software that they use internally, or by repurposing one tool for another use case, or by sticking with the limitations of a free version of an otherwise paid service that was designed to save time.
These companies typically think that their capital on hand is their most precious resource. In trying to be good stewards of that money, they end up working inefficiently with suboptimal tools, creating quite unnecessary overhead for themselves and in many cases incurring early technical debt.
When time is your most valuable resource, evaluate software carefully, then find a way to pay for it.