The $0 Subscription Startup Stack — Part 1: Build a product

This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog.

I’ve been building a SaaS startup for a couple of years now, and one of the things I noticed after a few months of operation is that all those small subscriptions I had for various things needed for the operation of the startup really start to add up. We have enough revenue now that those subscriptions don’t matter so much, but there was a time when they were a burden, particularly since we were bootstrapping.

I got to thinking whether it would be possible to build a startup stack with $0 in monthly subscriptions, and after putting together a list of the various tools we’ve been using, and looking for replacements for some of them where you can avoid the monthly subscription, I figured that this would be quite doable.

In this series of three articles, I’ll cover the different areas most startups need some help with, and list tools and approaches all of which have no fixed cost per month. Most of these are completely free, at least up to some decent level of usage, although some of the alternatives I list are zero subscription in the sense that you pay no fixed monthly fee although you do pay a small fee per usage.

Some of the services you use early on have high switching costs. I’ll try to point out tools that are like this, and give my advice on cases where I feel it may be good to invest some money early on to get you on the appropriate tool from day one, rather than having to spend a lot of time switching later.

I’ve spent almost 11 years doing startups (and almost 10 years leading technical projects at Google), but my recent startup experience is primarily from building a SaaS startup, so I’ll be able to provide the most relevant advice on categories of tools used by such startups. Many of the same tools apply to any type of startup, and I’ll also