💸 The Waitlist Indie SaaS Startup Stack, 2023 Edition

Last year, I wrote a popular blog post on the software stack that I use to run Waitlist, and how I managed to keep costs low spending only $281.32 a month to run a product that serves thousands of users and millions of signups and referrals. Building data-intensive growth and email marketing software could cost a lot, but I've managed to keep costs down by using third-party software and services efficiently, getting a ton of mileage out of cheap or free plans, and loading up on startup credits where possible.

Below is the monthly cost break-down, and then I'll go through each service in detail.

I'm going to skip the entries that are self-explanatory, and will only focus on the ones that are more interesting or significant to Waitlist. If you're curious about any services that I don't cover in this post, just look at last year's post where I covered in detail every service/product that I'm using here at Waitlist.

To me, the most interesting thing is how many services haven't changed between last year and now. The Waitlist software/services stack is almost the exact same as it was last year, with mostly the same pricing, despite growing. The only significant change was that I stopped using Stoplight, which was an API documentation tool. I was paying $99.00/mo until I realized that we really weren't getting that much out of it. Stoplight is probably the best API documentation tool on the market — much better than virtually any other solution we tried, and we tried plenty — but for Waitlist we didn't need that. We ended up using a free Tailwind documentation framework to draft our documentation.

Waitlist is still getting a lot of leverage out of free credits. If we were paying for AWS, Retool, Sentry, Figma, etc. and weren't on startup plans, we would easily be spending $1,000 a month. Getting and maintaining free startup credits is really important for any indie saas dev.

Just as last year, I'll note that we've also saved some money by building in-house some SaaS features that other companies are normally paying for. We don't use any email marketing tools like Mailchimp or customer.io because we don't do a lot of email marketing. The little that we do we handle via Sendgrid, where we designed some simple email marketing sequences and campaigns that run automatically.

It is interesting to note that out of all our services and infrastructure, Sendgrid is basically half our costs. 99% of what we send via sendgrid is transactional mail from our customers, i.e. their email marketing campaigns that they've configured inside their Waitlist Settings. If we can migrate from Sendgrid to SES, then that would take down the Waitlist email bill by almost 90%, and cut our total costs roughly in half — back down to the $280/mo range, which is where we were last year. 😊