11 ms·

:waves: Hi, I'm the founder of Cushion. I'd be happy to answer any questions about our running costs or transparency. (Thanks for posting, @Sujan!)

OoTheNigerian 10y ago
Great stuff!destroytoday! Regarding Heap Analytics, their pricing model is quite confusing. I'd like to know how many users/visitors to your website are you getting that allows it to be free. To you, is the almost $5k you're spending on Intercom worth it? How much does it come to per user? You moved away from Baremetrics to Chartmogul, something with not as good a design. Why?
- ezekg 10y ago
  I'm also curious as to why you moved from Baremetrics to ChartMogul.
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Thanks! In all honesty, we're way over Heap's free limit, but they haven't throttled us or reached out, so shhhhhh. Intercom is so worth it. We wouldn't be in the same position without it. The reason it's so high (as I mentioned in another answer) is that we also use it for sending our monthly newsletter. We could definitely get the cost much lower, and we're planning to, but I just need to sit down and do it. We've got our hands full with our current roadmap, so I haven't had the chance to move everyone to a more affordable email marketing service, but sooner than later. When I used Baremetrics, they were changing their pricing a lot and experimenting so much with growth tactics that I don't agree with, like removing the ability to cancel on your own—you now need to contact them. I tried ChartMogul and they've been absolutely wonderful. The team is so kind, helpful, and responsive. They also don't make drastic changes, which is refreshing since I only need them to track my Stripe metrics.
  - OoTheNigerian 10y ago
    Re: Newsletter. I cam across Email Octopus and I found setting them up easy. You may want to check it out. https://emailoctopus.com/ https://emailoctopus.com/ You should save as much money as you can. Any idea the new cost if you stop using Intercom for newsletters?
    - destroytoday 10y ago
      Thanks! Not entirely sure, but I think we’d at least cut the cost in half. Aside from user count, we still use a lot of their packages, which have a decent base price.
      - 02thoeva 10y ago
        I run EmailOctopus - happy to discuss anything we can do to help you out, as we're a relatively small SaaS business ourself and know the struggles.
  - nickfzx 10y ago
    "The team is so kind, helpful, and responsive." Founder of ChartMogul here...thank you for the nice comments, you made our success team's day! <3
    - aidos 10y ago
      Just to second that - Nick and the team at ChartMogul have been awesome to work with. The product has evolved in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. We tried Baremetrics originally but when we dug into the nitty gritty of the numbers, there was a lot missing. To be fair, this was 2 years ago so I'm sure it's changed a lot.
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    Baremetrics has been notoriously slow for the past 2 years - it should not take 10 seconds to load up static graphs (cache them and recalculate them on the backend every x hrs) i know they have a small team but their inexperienced tech/backend team has costed them dearly (again i know they probably have worked hard but you can tell them they are inexperienced)
- Shpigford 10y ago
  Heyo! Founder of Baremetrics here. Wanted to touch on a couple of things in this sub-thread on Baremetrics. It means a lot that literally _anyone_ has ever used Baremetrics. I started it over 3 years ago to scratch my own itch and hot dog it kinda took off. So, I'm grateful...certainly for the nearly 700 happy paying customers, but also for the others over the years who's experiences were less than stellar. We've had some growing pains, but the majority of the painful ones are far in the past. I did want to address the specific things folks brought up here, just to clear the air. * Regarding changing our pricing "a lot"...we've changed pricing just once in 3 years. And that was based directly on customer feedback. * Regarding us being "notoriously slow for the past 2 years"... We had some temporary scaling problems over a year ago, but that's just not the case any more. We've got a whole suite of server monitoring tools that show we have, in fact, not been "notoriously slow for 2 years". * Regarding us being "inexperienced"...busted! I've never built a complex analytics platform storing and processing in near real-time terabytes of data! ;) Every single entrepreneur is winging it. You'll make some good decisions and some bad ones. That's life. :) But to be clear our team is very equipped and extremely talented. We're just solving a complicated problem...much more complicated than anyone who's never built this sort of thing before realizes. At the end of the day, though, there are obviously some people who haven't had the experience they wanted with Baremetrics. I hate that that's the case, but we're constantly improving and innovating...most of the time for the better. If anyone has had a less-than-positive experience with Baremetrics, please email me. I'd love to chat: josh@baremetrics.com Thanks again for all the feedback!
  - uptown 10y ago
    Thanks for your response. I'm not a user of your service, but I've always appreciated your transparency with how you've run (and grown) your business.
Sujan 10y ago
Ha, that's what you get for finally posting to the journal (How it's made blog from Cushion [1]) again. That's why I still love my feed/RSS reader. [1] https://cushionapp.com/journal/ https://cushionapp.com/journal/
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Heh. I was curious if anyone was still subscribed.
mijoharas 10y ago
Hi, I was interested in what the crossed out lines represent?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Hi! The crossed-out costs are ones we no longer use. We either no longer needed that service, or we found a better alternative.
FanaHOVA 10y ago
Do you regret spending $2000+ on a domain name?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Ha! Not at all. It was a big expense, but I think it’s worth it for how we use it. The domain is "in.vc" and it’s used when sending an invoice link to clients. Instead of sending a super long link and possibly confusing clients with our app name, they see a short, generic link. I wish we had cushion.com, but last I checked, it sold for $120k in 2012, so that's off the table. :)
  - csomar 10y ago
    Is Cushion trademarked?
    - destroytoday 10y ago
      Yes! I should actually add that expense, too... Thanks for the reminder. :)
      - csomar 10y ago
        I was actually asking because I got an ethically-questionable, evil idea: If you are owning the Cushion word, can you sue for the domain name cushion.com?
        marban 10y ago
        No. The trademark must be registered and exist at the time the domain was registered and that the domain owner knowingly and intentionally registered the trademarked domain name.
        tmaly 10y ago
        how sure are you of this? I have owned a domain since 2003. a few years back a new startup named <domain> inc tried to buy it from me. they ended up getting domain.org but I checked recently and they registered the trademark. I was reading that I have only a few years to appeal it showing I am harmed by them. I did not read anywhere that they could not sue me
altern8tif 10y ago
Any particular reason you moved away from Mailchimp? Do you do any form of email marketing now?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  We switched to Intercom for sending our monthly email simply because its email editor is so good. I wish a proper email marketing service would come close to their simplicity, but I haven't seen anything yet. We might be moving back to Mailchimp soon because the per-user cost for Intercom has really skyrocketed since we've used them for email marketing. Granted, Intercom actually don't want people to use them for sending batch emails. I wish they'd come out with a standalone service for it—remain as dead-simple as their editor is now and they'd make a killing.
  - cdelb 10y ago
    Have you considered Drift as an alternative to Intercom? I have a small SaaS app as well, and my Intercom bill is about $130 a month compared to $50 with Drift.
    - destroytoday 10y ago
      I noticed them a while back, but I'm happy with Intercom. They're good people.
marban 10y ago
Have you ever considered any Heroku alternatives? I've had quite disappointing cost experiences last time i used it.
- destroytoday 10y ago
  We've thought about it, but Cushion is incredibly lightweight and doesn't need to be used constantly, so our load is very low. We've only needed 2 dynos since we launched and we're nowhere close to needing more than that. As much as I'd like to lower the cost, they truly take so much weight off our shoulders. I gladly pay what we're paying now, so it's not an issue for us.
  - cobookman 10y ago
    Have you looked into Appengine Flex. Appengine flex is a PaaS like heroku, and will scale up any docker container. Its a great solution for your early days, and when you do need to move to a 1000+ node cluster its easy to switch from Appengine Flex to kubernetes. You also might get a lot of free startup credits https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ (Disclaimer, I work for Google). [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/
    - marban 10y ago
      You should mention Python 3 support specifically.
    - destroytoday 10y ago
      I haven't, but I'll check it out. Seems like it's still beta? (says not to use in production)
AsyncAwait 10y ago
So I am wondering about heroku: you say that it's quite expensive, but $25/mo doesn't seem that much. How many users can one $25/mo server actually power?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  I think I wrote that when they had their older pricing, or I didn’t realize their real value. Also, I’m pretty sure we could run Cushion on a single dyno, but I like having two around to balance.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Aha, makes sense. Thanks!
simooooo 10y ago
Why is directory listing turned on
- destroytoday 10y ago
  We just made the page static to handle the HN traffic, so there were a few seconds between the switch. pulls collar Didn’t expect to get featured today.
moeamaya 10y ago
Hey Jonnie! I'm super curious about the move away from Siteleaf (esp since you're so close to the Oak guys), and how you+marketing team ended up on Craft?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Hi! Great question. I love static websites, but we hit a point where we were updating the site constantly and needed dynamic content, like the running costs (which pulls its data from a google spreadsheet). There are certainly ways to do this with a static site, but with the size of the site and frequency that we update it, I really wanted to be able to hit save and it was live, rather than wait for everything to compile and publish. I still use Siteleaf for all of my other websites, but cushionapp.com is a different beast. Also, lol at "marketing team". I am marketing team. :)
  - moeamaya 10y ago
    Ah okay that makes a ton of sense with how dynamic the site now is. Looking back now, would you have still gone with a static site generator or started with something dynamic (question we're pondering now with monograph.io which is middleman)? Also on the marketing team, I got head-faked by the growth freelancer, and assumed you went with a dynamic CMS to get more help. But man impressed with how much you still do!
  - shanecleveland 10y ago
    Thanks for the insight this provides. Any chance you could share this spreadsheet template?
AtheistOfFail 10y ago
Why don't you guys use the new Heroku beta SSL feature so you can bank that extra $20 a month? It's not much but it makes a difference if you're spinning multiple sites up. https://blog.heroku.com/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_flexible_dyno_hours https://blog.heroku.com/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_...
- gkop 10y ago
  FYI I don't think it's beta anymore :)
- destroytoday 10y ago
  We would, but unfortunately, we need their "old" SSL add-on to get SSL to work with the root URL of our invoice url, in.vc. Apparently, the new SSL doesn’t work the same.
  - AtheistOfFail 10y ago
    There's a guide for converting your certs, it's just a format issue most of the time.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
Rezo 10y ago
Hi fellow NY SaaS developer :) I ran a similar report for our year end books, and it's amazing the amount of SaaS it takes to run a SaaS. Or put another way, the incredible ecosystem now available that allows you to focus on your core business. I don't see any third party Stripe dunning service, did you build something similar yourself? Otherwise it might be worth looking into, it's one of those things that pays itself back in no time.
- aidos 10y ago
  For anyone else looking into recurring billing I'd highly recommend Chargebee (not affiliated at all). We've tried a few different solutions and were a little apprehensive at first because it looked a bit clunky but it's actually one of the best bits of software I've used. You don't realise the number of features a subscription billing platform needs until you use something like chargebee and discover how wonderful it is to have someone do it all for you. What's really great is before changing anything they give you a pop up showing what's going to be billed now, what will happen in the future etc. We used stripe before switching and I was a nervous wreck before ever pushing any buttons. My co-founder and I were saying just the other day that we think it's one of the best investments we've made as a company. https://www.chargebee.com https://www.chargebee.com
  - stevrodr 10y ago
    Oh wow, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing!
    - aidos 10y ago
      Glad to have helped! I discovered them when trying to find a solution for the insane EU Vat regulations (which they handle gracefully). We've been with them through a big few tasks now (like when they added Xero integration - which is also an amazing feature) and if there's any confusion with mapping data or whatever they'll always jump on a video call to make sure everyone is 100% clear on what's going on.
cpncrunch 10y ago
Care to share your revenue (or at least a ballpark?)
fredgrott 10y ago
Thank you for the info as it helps me formulate how to do a small non unicorn start-up in a smaller fashion..very helpfull
wwalser 10y ago
Thus far legal has been one my most significant cost (incorporation + NY qualification). Perhaps I'm doing it wrong -_-. What do your numbers there look like?
- destroytoday 10y ago
  Fortunately, I was able to find a really great lawyer who is actually affordable (previously interviewed a few law firms who were $700+/hr). Besides incorporating, legal costs haven't been too high. Just the occasional contract here or there, or updating our terms.

OoTheNigerian 10y ago

Great stuff!destroytoday! Regarding Heap Analytics, their pricing model is quite confusing. I'd like to know how many users/visitors to your website are you getting that allows it to be free. To you, is the almost $5k you're spending on Intercom worth it? How much does it come to per user? You moved away from Baremetrics to Chartmogul, something with not as good a design. Why?

ezekg 10y ago
I'm also curious as to why you moved from Baremetrics to ChartMogul.
destroytoday 10y ago
Thanks! In all honesty, we're way over Heap's free limit, but they haven't throttled us or reached out, so shhhhhh. Intercom is so worth it. We wouldn't be in the same position without it. The reason it's so high (as I mentioned in another answer) is that we also use it for sending our monthly newsletter. We could definitely get the cost much lower, and we're planning to, but I just need to sit down and do it. We've got our hands full with our current roadmap, so I haven't had the chance to move everyone to a more affordable email marketing service, but sooner than later. When I used Baremetrics, they were changing their pricing a lot and experimenting so much with growth tactics that I don't agree with, like removing the ability to cancel on your own—you now need to contact them. I tried ChartMogul and they've been absolutely wonderful. The team is so kind, helpful, and responsive. They also don't make drastic changes, which is refreshing since I only need them to track my Stripe metrics.
- OoTheNigerian 10y ago
  Re: Newsletter. I cam across Email Octopus and I found setting them up easy. You may want to check it out. https://emailoctopus.com/ https://emailoctopus.com/ You should save as much money as you can. Any idea the new cost if you stop using Intercom for newsletters?
  - destroytoday 10y ago
    Thanks! Not entirely sure, but I think we’d at least cut the cost in half. Aside from user count, we still use a lot of their packages, which have a decent base price.
    - 02thoeva 10y ago
      I run EmailOctopus - happy to discuss anything we can do to help you out, as we're a relatively small SaaS business ourself and know the struggles.
- nickfzx 10y ago
  "The team is so kind, helpful, and responsive." Founder of ChartMogul here...thank you for the nice comments, you made our success team's day! <3
  - aidos 10y ago
    Just to second that - Nick and the team at ChartMogul have been awesome to work with. The product has evolved in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. We tried Baremetrics originally but when we dug into the nitty gritty of the numbers, there was a lot missing. To be fair, this was 2 years ago so I'm sure it's changed a lot.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  Baremetrics has been notoriously slow for the past 2 years - it should not take 10 seconds to load up static graphs (cache them and recalculate them on the backend every x hrs) i know they have a small team but their inexperienced tech/backend team has costed them dearly (again i know they probably have worked hard but you can tell them they are inexperienced)
Shpigford 10y ago
Heyo! Founder of Baremetrics here. Wanted to touch on a couple of things in this sub-thread on Baremetrics. It means a lot that literally _anyone_ has ever used Baremetrics. I started it over 3 years ago to scratch my own itch and hot dog it kinda took off. So, I'm grateful...certainly for the nearly 700 happy paying customers, but also for the others over the years who's experiences were less than stellar. We've had some growing pains, but the majority of the painful ones are far in the past. I did want to address the specific things folks brought up here, just to clear the air. * Regarding changing our pricing "a lot"...we've changed pricing just once in 3 years. And that was based directly on customer feedback. * Regarding us being "notoriously slow for the past 2 years"... We had some temporary scaling problems over a year ago, but that's just not the case any more. We've got a whole suite of server monitoring tools that show we have, in fact, not been "notoriously slow for 2 years". * Regarding us being "inexperienced"...busted! I've never built a complex analytics platform storing and processing in near real-time terabytes of data! ;) Every single entrepreneur is winging it. You'll make some good decisions and some bad ones. That's life. :) But to be clear our team is very equipped and extremely talented. We're just solving a complicated problem...much more complicated than anyone who's never built this sort of thing before realizes. At the end of the day, though, there are obviously some people who haven't had the experience they wanted with Baremetrics. I hate that that's the case, but we're constantly improving and innovating...most of the time for the better. If anyone has had a less-than-positive experience with Baremetrics, please email me. I'd love to chat: josh@baremetrics.com Thanks again for all the feedback!
- uptown 10y ago
  Thanks for your response. I'm not a user of your service, but I've always appreciated your transparency with how you've run (and grown) your business.

Sujan 10y ago

Ha, that's what you get for finally posting to the journal (How it's made blog from Cushion [1]) again. That's why I still love my feed/RSS reader. [1] https://cushionapp.com/journal/ https://cushionapp.com/journal/

destroytoday 10y ago
Heh. I was curious if anyone was still subscribed.

mijoharas 10y ago

Hi, I was interested in what the crossed out lines represent?

destroytoday 10y ago
Hi! The crossed-out costs are ones we no longer use. We either no longer needed that service, or we found a better alternative.

FanaHOVA 10y ago

Do you regret spending $2000+ on a domain name?

destroytoday 10y ago
Ha! Not at all. It was a big expense, but I think it’s worth it for how we use it. The domain is "in.vc" and it’s used when sending an invoice link to clients. Instead of sending a super long link and possibly confusing clients with our app name, they see a short, generic link. I wish we had cushion.com, but last I checked, it sold for $120k in 2012, so that's off the table. :)
- csomar 10y ago
  Is Cushion trademarked?
  - destroytoday 10y ago
    Yes! I should actually add that expense, too... Thanks for the reminder. :)
    - csomar 10y ago
      I was actually asking because I got an ethically-questionable, evil idea: If you are owning the Cushion word, can you sue for the domain name cushion.com?
      - marban 10y ago
        No. The trademark must be registered and exist at the time the domain was registered and that the domain owner knowingly and intentionally registered the trademarked domain name.
        tmaly 10y ago
        how sure are you of this? I have owned a domain since 2003. a few years back a new startup named <domain> inc tried to buy it from me. they ended up getting domain.org but I checked recently and they registered the trademark. I was reading that I have only a few years to appeal it showing I am harmed by them. I did not read anywhere that they could not sue me

altern8tif 10y ago

Any particular reason you moved away from Mailchimp? Do you do any form of email marketing now?

destroytoday 10y ago
We switched to Intercom for sending our monthly email simply because its email editor is so good. I wish a proper email marketing service would come close to their simplicity, but I haven't seen anything yet. We might be moving back to Mailchimp soon because the per-user cost for Intercom has really skyrocketed since we've used them for email marketing. Granted, Intercom actually don't want people to use them for sending batch emails. I wish they'd come out with a standalone service for it—remain as dead-simple as their editor is now and they'd make a killing.
- cdelb 10y ago
  Have you considered Drift as an alternative to Intercom? I have a small SaaS app as well, and my Intercom bill is about $130 a month compared to $50 with Drift.
  - destroytoday 10y ago
    I noticed them a while back, but I'm happy with Intercom. They're good people.

marban 10y ago

Have you ever considered any Heroku alternatives? I've had quite disappointing cost experiences last time i used it.

destroytoday 10y ago
We've thought about it, but Cushion is incredibly lightweight and doesn't need to be used constantly, so our load is very low. We've only needed 2 dynos since we launched and we're nowhere close to needing more than that. As much as I'd like to lower the cost, they truly take so much weight off our shoulders. I gladly pay what we're paying now, so it's not an issue for us.
- cobookman 10y ago
  Have you looked into Appengine Flex. Appengine flex is a PaaS like heroku, and will scale up any docker container. Its a great solution for your early days, and when you do need to move to a 1000+ node cluster its easy to switch from Appengine Flex to kubernetes. You also might get a lot of free startup credits https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ (Disclaimer, I work for Google). [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/
  - marban 10y ago
    You should mention Python 3 support specifically.
  - destroytoday 10y ago
    I haven't, but I'll check it out. Seems like it's still beta? (says not to use in production)

AsyncAwait 10y ago

So I am wondering about heroku: you say that it's quite expensive, but $25/mo doesn't seem that much. How many users can one $25/mo server actually power?

destroytoday 10y ago
I think I wrote that when they had their older pricing, or I didn’t realize their real value. Also, I’m pretty sure we could run Cushion on a single dyno, but I like having two around to balance.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  Aha, makes sense. Thanks!

simooooo 10y ago

Why is directory listing turned on

destroytoday 10y ago
We just made the page static to handle the HN traffic, so there were a few seconds between the switch. pulls collar Didn’t expect to get featured today.

moeamaya 10y ago

Hey Jonnie! I'm super curious about the move away from Siteleaf (esp since you're so close to the Oak guys), and how you+marketing team ended up on Craft?

destroytoday 10y ago
Hi! Great question. I love static websites, but we hit a point where we were updating the site constantly and needed dynamic content, like the running costs (which pulls its data from a google spreadsheet). There are certainly ways to do this with a static site, but with the size of the site and frequency that we update it, I really wanted to be able to hit save and it was live, rather than wait for everything to compile and publish. I still use Siteleaf for all of my other websites, but cushionapp.com is a different beast. Also, lol at "marketing team". I am marketing team. :)
- moeamaya 10y ago
  Ah okay that makes a ton of sense with how dynamic the site now is. Looking back now, would you have still gone with a static site generator or started with something dynamic (question we're pondering now with monograph.io which is middleman)? Also on the marketing team, I got head-faked by the growth freelancer, and assumed you went with a dynamic CMS to get more help. But man impressed with how much you still do!
- shanecleveland 10y ago
  Thanks for the insight this provides. Any chance you could share this spreadsheet template?

AtheistOfFail 10y ago

Why don't you guys use the new Heroku beta SSL feature so you can bank that extra $20 a month? It's not much but it makes a difference if you're spinning multiple sites up. https://blog.heroku.com/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_flexible_dyno_hours https://blog.heroku.com/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_...

gkop 10y ago
FYI I don't think it's beta anymore :)
destroytoday 10y ago
We would, but unfortunately, we need their "old" SSL add-on to get SSL to work with the root URL of our invoice url, in.vc. Apparently, the new SSL doesn’t work the same.
- AtheistOfFail 10y ago
  There's a guide for converting your certs, it's just a format issue most of the time.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Rezo 10y ago

Hi fellow NY SaaS developer :) I ran a similar report for our year end books, and it's amazing the amount of SaaS it takes to run a SaaS. Or put another way, the incredible ecosystem now available that allows you to focus on your core business. I don't see any third party Stripe dunning service, did you build something similar yourself? Otherwise it might be worth looking into, it's one of those things that pays itself back in no time.

aidos 10y ago
For anyone else looking into recurring billing I'd highly recommend Chargebee (not affiliated at all). We've tried a few different solutions and were a little apprehensive at first because it looked a bit clunky but it's actually one of the best bits of software I've used. You don't realise the number of features a subscription billing platform needs until you use something like chargebee and discover how wonderful it is to have someone do it all for you. What's really great is before changing anything they give you a pop up showing what's going to be billed now, what will happen in the future etc. We used stripe before switching and I was a nervous wreck before ever pushing any buttons. My co-founder and I were saying just the other day that we think it's one of the best investments we've made as a company. https://www.chargebee.com https://www.chargebee.com
- stevrodr 10y ago
  Oh wow, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing!
  - aidos 10y ago
    Glad to have helped! I discovered them when trying to find a solution for the insane EU Vat regulations (which they handle gracefully). We've been with them through a big few tasks now (like when they added Xero integration - which is also an amazing feature) and if there's any confusion with mapping data or whatever they'll always jump on a video call to make sure everyone is 100% clear on what's going on.

cpncrunch 10y ago

Care to share your revenue (or at least a ballpark?)

fredgrott 10y ago

Thank you for the info as it helps me formulate how to do a small non unicorn start-up in a smaller fashion..very helpfull

wwalser 10y ago

Thus far legal has been one my most significant cost (incorporation + NY qualification). Perhaps I'm doing it wrong -_-. What do your numbers there look like?

destroytoday 10y ago
Fortunately, I was able to find a really great lawyer who is actually affordable (previously interviewed a few law firms who were $700+/hr). Besides incorporating, legal costs haven't been too high. Just the occasional contract here or there, or updating our terms.