Ask HN: What tech problems would you glady pay $25 a month for a SAAS solution?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284833

by seanpackham • 14 years ago

25 33 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

alpine2• 14 years ago

Smart monitoring tool that would automatically check:

- Front end web site availability

- APIs available

- Back end processes are running

- Database up

- Disk space available

- Error logs for important issues

The database checks would include referencal integrity and sanity checks on volumes to warn of potential issues eg a failed module or abuse by a user.

Daily and weekly reports by Email, RSS, Twitter, web tool. SMS for emergencies requiring immediate action.

Option to have support from a Sys Admin/DBA automatically trigger to fix minor issues.

morganpyne• 14 years ago

Sounds like you should give New Relic a try so :-) Although unfortunately their pro plan is a little more than $25/month

seanpackham6• 14 years ago

Have you tried any of the available solutions and what issues do you have with them?

alpine2• 14 years ago

I haven't tried any possible solutions. Building an inhouse monitor is a possibility, but I would pay for a service if it was only $25 pm. Particularly if it included the option of buying Sys Admin/DBA support, charged hourly as required, with the aim being the effective outsource of day to day monitoring and tech support of a site.

tgriesser• 14 years ago

I recently came across http://amon.cx/ which does a few of the things you mentioned, and it's a one time purchase (with a free basic version) rather than a SaaS. Might be worth taking a look at.

dholowiski• 14 years ago

Wow thanks, I need that. Can't believe it's only $25.

callmeed• 14 years ago

I'm working on a simple version of this which I plan to open-source soon. You basically cron commands like df and uptime, pipe them to mail and send to app. App uses MailGun to read mail and then create reports.

Looks like this: http://cl.ly/image/0Z15301Q3L1u

RileyJames• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but it is tech business related.

Currently frustrated that highrise does not timestamp tags, or allow tags to be sorted by a timestamp.

If you could add that feature as a plugin or via their api I would gladly pay $25 per month.

Haven't looked extensively for a solution, but it's certainly a pain point at the moment.

seanpackham6• 14 years ago

I asked this question wanting to know what day to day issues people struggle with, what tasks they repeat a dozen times a day, what 20 process step can be reduced to 3 or even better completely automated.

Thank you for the answers so far!

ig13• 14 years ago

From validation. It's a pain to write validation code and to do it cleanly, give me an ajax service that I can hand the validation off to. I just want to be able to say field x is a number, field y is an address, etc.

seanpackham6• 14 years ago

Hmm I think trying to convert such a task into a service will always introduce some language to describe your field and it's constraints and then you might as well write it yourself.

Also with such a critical part of your system, getting information from your user, if the service is slow or down you will run into troubles.

What specific programming languages and/or frameworks do you require a solution for? Please let me know if I missed the point completely. Thanks for your answer!

ig13• 14 years ago

Well I was imagining some kind of ajax thing that validated fields on the fly as the user filled them in.

Validation is non-trivial for many fields. For example almost no-one implements email validation correctly as per the RFC because it's hard to get right, and most people just use a hacky regex that ends up accepting invalid emails and rejecting valid ones.

Or with credit card validation, many places don't validate credit card numbers (i.e doing the validation checksum, checking if the card is a mastercard that it's got the mastercard prefix) before sending them to the card processor site. If the card processing services rejects the card and the user has to re-enter the card details, chance are they won't bother and you've lost yourself a sale. If you validated for obvious mistakes on-the-fly (i.e user sees error immediately) you wouldn't lose as many of those customers.

You could also do things like supplementing the user supplied data, say the user supplies an address you could automatically geocode it and put it in a hidden field for the website.

bhousel4• 14 years ago

$25/month is kind of an ambitious price point for small teams or individuals. That's like implying that your service would be more valuable than Basecamp or Github.

seanpackham6• 14 years ago

Surely it depends on the problem being solved though? If I was making a new project management or source code hosting service I would have to think twice about charging the same or more than my competitors alternatively I need to compete on something other than price. Also if a you need a solution to problem X how can the price point be compared to an established company solving problem Y?

I'm curious, are you a developer?

bhousel4• 14 years ago

>if a you need a solution to problem X how can the price point be compared to an established company solving problem Y?

If problem X and problem Y both cost $25/month to solve, they should be roughly equal pain-wise. By starting at price point of $25/month, and working your way backwards to find problems, you should expect to be tackling Github- or Basecamp-sized problems.

>I'm curious, are you a developer?

Yes, I'm a developer/consultant.

pfedor• 14 years ago

By the same logic, any price greater than zero would be implying that your service is infinitely more valuable than Google Search?

bhousel4• 14 years ago

No, Google Search is not a SAAS. That would be comparing two different things.

dchuk• 14 years ago

One of the biggest mistakes startups regularly make is to not charge enough

sharemywin• 14 years ago

social network api where user can login via different networks and import contacts/friends/following. Must be able to have different types of users. and add extra fields like hobbies etc. on sign up form. Must have a javascript widgets I can drop on a screen and cusomtze look and feel or api I can call with backend. Tracking of user. User can share/post message to friends followers etc. mobile sdk also.

pdenya• 14 years ago

Document to Document conversion API. eg: docx => pdf

should be secure, auto detect formats, etc.

bdunbar• 14 years ago

There are a lot of guys out there that do this - are they lacking in some way that could be improved?

TimJRobinson2• 14 years ago

Good automatic accounting that can handle multiple accounts and multiple currencies. In fact I would pay $100 a month for this.

seanpackham6• 14 years ago

By automatic do you mean it should hook into your accounts and automatically categorize various items as expenses and provide an income statement and balance sheet every month?

TimJRobinson2• 14 years ago

Yep, as automatic as possible. It could try and auto categorize items and allow the user to fine tune the categorization. But basically doing what an accountant normally does automatically.

stewie2• 14 years ago

full featured photoshop alternative. full featured 3d max alternative.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

I'd want a SaaS that when given a URL of an article or piece of content I just wrote... gives me a bunch of related Twitter followers, potential LinkedIn Groups, bloggers, etc where I can pitch my content to. Content marketing tool, so to speak. Hard problem, but hey, that's why I'd pay a lot for it.

Ask HN: What tech problems would you glady pay $25 a month for a SAAS solution?

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