I work remote now (well I run my own software co), and with nothing tying me down I settled on San Diego a few years ago. Love it here, but it's very expensive (looking to buy soon) and I miss the mountains (and green stuff)... so I'm planning to move to Tahoe as soon as the restrictions lift.
I run a SaaS company for event organizers (sell tickets, etc)... it's a ghost town. It's kind of nice actually, I get to catch up on work in peace. I've been installing and customizing Datadog, fixing some rare bugs, finally getting around to that feature...
I run a Saas business solo, for eight years now, netting six figures, and I've been on Heroku the entire time for just under $1,000 a month. Monolithic rails app on a single database, 300 tables.
Sometimes I feel teased by 'moving to EC2' or another hot topic to save a few bucks, but the reality is I've spent at most 2 hours a month doing `heroku pg:upgrade` for maintenance once a year, and `git push production master` for deploys and I'd like to keep it that way. I just hope Heroku doesn't get complacent as they are showing signs of aging. They need a dyno refresh, http/2, and wildcard SSL out of the box. I honestly have no idea what the equivalent EC2/RDS costs are and I'm not sure I want to know.
You should look into render.com which provides a service similar to Heroku. I haven't used them myself and have no connection with them. Their name does pop up a fair bit though.
Agreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business. The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.
If you want an in-between I'm a huge fan of DigitalOcean. Fantastic documentation, better support in my experience, all in all more welcoming to the 'middle-guy.' Totally understand that it's probably not a great use of your time to switch over if your margins can afford 800/mo with ease.
Heroku. Used to be paying around 1,500 month, but with some major surgery got it down to ~$750. You can't really go any lower without becoming a "hobby" app.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Heroku yet. I'm a one man business too, and 90% of the details in this post I don't even have to worry about. Sure I pay a pretty penny for it - at least a thousand a month - but it just works. Rails and all of its beauties, postgres, redis, sidekiq, sendgrid, twilio, Scout, Papertrail, and that's about it. Looking to add AppOptics soon for business KPI / APM metrics.
Love my SE. Replaced the battery for $15 off Amazon yesterday. With replacements available on ebay for under $100, I don't have to baby my phone or use a case.
If apple offered a modern SE, I'd probably buy it, but I'm also quite happy with my SE as-is. If the SE wasn't getting iOS 13, I don't know what I'd do... thankfully it is.
As a small business owner, what I like about the Chase business cards is rewards come back in the form of points that I can easily transfer to my personal cards. It sounds like Stripe applies them towards the statement, i.e., benefit goes to the business, not to me personally.
However, the 50k free processing is very enticing as thats way higher than any other signup bonus I've seen. But again, credit goes to business, not to me. With a typical chase card, I'll get ~$1,000 worth of points (tax free) added directly to my personal points balance for simply switching a few business expenses to that new card for a couple of months.
> As a small business owner, what I like about the Chase business cards is rewards come back in the form of points that I can easily transfer to my personal cards. It sounds like Stripe applies them towards the statement, i.e., benefit goes to the business, not to me personally.
Extracting a thing of value that was remitted to the business to a personal account for personal use sounds like embezzlement, but IANAL.
Usually I'll let the points sit and use them when I have to travel - so the points never touch my bank accounts. I'm not a tax expert, but for that reason I don't bother reporting any income on it
Travel status/miles are sort of similar. It’s a basic racket: the airline rewards you for steering your company’s money to them. It seems to be broadly acceptable but I agree looks pretty sketchy when you boil it down to the basics.
But if the business spends $100 and the rebate is $2, but I personally pocket the rebate instead of giving the money back to the business, wouldn't that $2 become taxable personal income? (and perhaps also theft, depending on my relationship to the business?)
If you run a small business and have a SB card, spending just $100k can get you more than $1k in rewards a year. $1k is still probably not worth the IRS tracking down, but getting on the IRS being too busy to tackle your tax fraud is still tax fraud.
