Maybe it helps some other devs out there (to find an idea or something to work on), but here are the services that I pay for to run my business:





Heroku (~$200/month): Running 3 different projects, and some with jobs servers as well

Upwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers. I especially use Upwork because I don't have to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc.

Sentry ($29/month): Absolutely essential for catching bugs fast. I started with freemium and then they eventually *got* me on # of errors/usage.

Klaviyo: Send emails to all my lists.

SendGrid ($15/month): To send various transactional emails. Like Sentry, I started for free and then they nabbed as email volume increased.

G Suite ($6/month): For Starter Story email address.

Stripe (Fees): Obvious.

Buffer ($15/month): For social media automation. I use their API, it's amazing. Lived off their free plan forever until I wanted to automate LinkedIn posts

Placid ($19/month): For automation of social sharing images, OG images, social media.

Blogcast (~$30/month): Automatically creates audio versions of blog posts for Starter Story.

Simple Analytics ($19/month): Privacy-focused analytics that I use for this blog you're reading right now.

Mailbrew ($15/month): Sends me an email every day of any Starter Story mentions and other automations so I can stay off Twitter.

Adobe Premiere ($22/month): Video editing software.

AWS ($10/month): S3 and I also use the Alexa API.

WIP.chat ($20/month): Chat community for makers. If it weren't for WIP, I don't know if I would have made it in the early days.

Nomad List (~$8/month): Community for digital nomads. Makes it really easy to find cheap places to live/work.

Notion ($5/month): Somehow they nabbed me off their free plan. I can't remember really.

Cloudflare ($5/month): I pay extra for some of the rate-limiting features.

Pigeon CRM for Gmail: ($19/month): To run operations at Starter Story. Yes I pay for my own app! I think it's important to see that charge come in every month :)

Various: (~$100/month): Accountant + domains + I have a small budget to support indie makers with one-time payments and some Patreon subscriptions as well.



What I would pay for but somehow get away with the free plan:





Crisp.chat. Use this religiously to talk with leads and customers for Pigeon

Loom. Crazy how much value is in this software.

Calendly. Used this a ton in the early days of Pigeon.

Strava. Still living off the free plan.

Email Hunter. Amazing for getting email addresses. Their API is clutch.



Will think of more as they come.