Cheap or free web-based tools for your web startup

http://blog.flexvite.com/2010/03/30/12-cheap-or-free-web-based-tools-your-web-startup-know-about/

by mpstx • 16 years ago

129 53 16 years ago

blog.flexvite.com

The madmimi website gave me a headache.

Is there any site which allows me to display a text box on my site and collects the emails given and allows me to send newsletters?

oneplusone• 16 years ago

Use CampaignMonitor. By far the best tool for the job. http://www.campaignmonitor.com

redorb• 16 years ago

I agree campaignMonitor has some great analytics / at the link below you can view a good screen shot of the analytics page..

http://imgur.com/uq9zn

pchristensen2• 16 years ago

Mailchimp is awesome. Don't know how it compares to Campaign Monitor. If you're a belt & suspenders type, use a Wufoo form and send that to MailChimp, then you can easily switch later.

grinich• 16 years ago

The email collection tools in Campaign Monitor are totally free. You just pay when you send mail.

When I was organizing Startup Bootcamp, I emailed both CM and MailChimp to ask for a donation. MailChip offered us a discount, but CM gave us an extremely generous number of credits that easily covered our needs.

Using CM is a breeze. Originally we were using a Google Doc as a signup, and felt the need to switch once we hit a few hundred people. Importing the data was effortless, and CM has built-in checks for both duplicate and malformed emails. Their analytics and reporting is also great. Highly recommended.

Garyjoe32• 16 years ago

Mad Mimi does this. Click on Tools, and choose the webform.

3pt14159• 16 years ago

domai.nr is by far the best domain finding service and is also totally free. I've bought 8 or so domains with it.

mpstx• 16 years ago

+1 I used domai.nr as well, but less frequently than the other two mentioned. Domai.nr is great for finding shorter names and creative variations of longer ones.

eurokc98• 16 years ago

I enjoy using instantdomainsearch for domain hunting.

enjoyaol• 16 years ago

really appreciated the list of tools. Anybody with a similar list but with other tasks ?

yurylifshits2• 16 years ago

Here is a longer list specifically for web publishers: http://publisherapps.org

giangbiscan• 16 years ago

Great list. Thanks for sharing.

sumeetjain• 16 years ago

My favorite tool for finding available domains while discovering product/company name ideas is http://wordoid.com - made by a HNer, I think.

Jasber• 16 years ago

Wordoid is great. Another favorite of mine is: http://www.nxdom.com/

Shameless plug: I threw up http://domaingroovy.com/ to keep track of sites like these. Maybe someone else will find it useful.

phsr• 16 years ago

How is Google App Engine? Are there any pain points one should be aware of before using it?

bockris• 16 years ago

You mean besides lock-in?

jazzdev3• 16 years ago

There's no lock-in on the Java side. Change a few lines in jdconfig.xml, add the datanucleus-rdbms jar file, add a JDBC driver jar file and you're app will run on Tomcat or Jetty with MySQL or any database with a JDBC driver.

jeff182• 16 years ago

Check out the AppScale project: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

You can run your App Engine apps pretty much anywhere.

eop5• 16 years ago

No RDBMS. No SQL. No joins. That's the main adjustment for me. But after you adjust to that, it's great.

sadiq• 16 years ago

I thought NoSQL was a selling point these days?

cgrinds3• 16 years ago

Cold startup sucks - it's horrendous for Java and just bad for Python.

If you have a popular app, this isn't an issue. If you don't, it hurts.

eop5• 16 years ago

Cold startup is almost unnoticeable for Python apps (bite my lip! see update below). On the Java side it can be an issue but, as with most things, if you dig around, you can find some acceptable workarounds.

cmelbye3• 16 years ago

They're fixing this in the future by allowing reserved instances that will always run.

jeff182• 16 years ago

Couldn't you just set up a cron job to ping your app every 15 minutes until you start getting some real traffic?

jazzdev3• 16 years ago

The 30 second per page limit can be a pain too. If you need to manipulate (i.e. validate, import, export, etc.) more than a few hundred persistent objects, you'll need to write your code to do it in chunks.

eop5• 16 years ago

That's what Task Queue is for:

With the Task Queue API, applications can perform work outside of a user request but initiated by a user request. If an app needs to execute some background work, it may use the Task Queue API to organize that work into small, discrete units, called Tasks. The app then inserts these Tasks into one or more Queues. App Engine automatically detects new Tasks and executes them when system resources permit.

Python:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/overv...

Java:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/taskqueue/overvie...

CytokineStorm• 16 years ago

Wait, no Heroku? It should definitely be listed in the Price-Scalable Hosting section. Like AppEngine it's also free starting out, and super easy to scale. Plus it's all rails, so you don't even have to learn any App Engine API.

cmelbye3• 16 years ago

I think it's a lot more expensive than App Engine though. You quickly get into hundreds of dollars a month range for just a few extra features and two running processes.

hopeless• 16 years ago

That's a humorous exaggeration, right?

2 x processes + 20GB database = $51/mth

Most people won't require every addon, and there's a free or cheap option in every case. Yes, you can spend "hundreds of dollars a month" but not easily

mhartl2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure I trust Google App Engine; it's a roundoff error for Google. Why should they care if something goes wrong? Heroku cares about Ruby webapp deployment the way Google cares about search.

yurylifshits2• 16 years ago

Here is a longer list specifically for web publishers: http://publisherapps.org

fender0011• 16 years ago

Great article.

sharpn2• 16 years ago

I found this helps when collaborating remotely, to send big files around - and there are other companies offering a similar service:

http://free.mailbigfile.com/index.php

torial2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I like the Axosoft free variant: http://www.transferbigfiles.com/

sharpn2• 16 years ago

Good suggestion - I like their higher size limit of 1Gb. I'll check this out, thanks.

torial2• 16 years ago

Didn't see this category, but for the developers of a startup, an easy to use / free bug tracking system can be found in BugNotes: http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php

imagetic• 16 years ago

http://lighthouseapp.com and http://tenderapp.com for bug tracking and support tools that integrate.

Groxx• 16 years ago

For browser compatibility: browsershots.org

Litmusapp may be nicer and have summaries, but it's hard to beat browsershot's simplicity, breadth, and free-ness. Though I have yet to see any provide decent testing for anything dynamic (videos, perhaps?).

Pistos22• 16 years ago

browsershots.org is good, but some generator nodes can be extremely slow (30 minute wait times). For IE-only screenshots, I like to use http://meineipadresse.de/netrenderer/index.php , which provides IE screenshots in about 7 seconds.

kylemathews• 16 years ago

browserlab.adobe.com/ is very fast and free as well.

tonetheman• 16 years ago

http://crossbrowsertesting.com is also a good choice (I am biased), we have live testing (VNC) and screenshots. we are working on video.

armandososa• 16 years ago

I didn't know http://www.ask500people.com/. Looks like an useful resource. I don't care about the map though.

Pistos22• 16 years ago

+1 for Pivotal Tracker. One of the most polished UIs I've worked with. It's a pleasure for development teams to use; I use it for both freelancing and the day job. Also helps management have its finger on the pulse of progress, and have an accurate answer to the question "when will X be done?"

ledger123• 16 years ago

I am working on simplified hosted accounting service for startups based upon open source sql-ledger. There will be a free single user version.

Keep yourself updated via blog or mailing list (see my info)

calaniz• 16 years ago

Woopra is a great realtime analytics service. I'm building our iPhone client...

mhartl2• 16 years ago

The recommended site vyew.com looks good, but

  http://vyew.com/

301s to

  http://vyew.com/site

which in turn 301s to

  http://vyew.com/site/index3

Two 301 redirects, and a damn ugly default URL to boot—I have a hard time trusting them to get anything else right. Am I wrong?

Cheap or free web-based tools for your web startup

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