Note that some links may be affiliate links, and kudos to Cushion for the inspiration behind this page. (All costs are monthly; I list one-time purchases as having an ongoing cost of "$0".)
(Interested in the open source software we use and maintain? Check out the open-source software page.)
Service | Genre | Since | Cost | 1Password | Productivity | 2019 | $8.00 | AHrefs | Marketing | 2021 | $99.00 | Amazon Relational Database Service | Infrastructure | 2020 | $500.00 | Amazon Simple Email Service | Infrastructure | 2021 | $50.00 | Amazon Simple Storage Service | Infrastructure | 2017 | $64.00 | Audiogest | Productivity | 2024 | $8.00 | Bear | Productivity | 2023 | $3.00 | Better Stack | Operations | 2022 | $80.00 | Buttondown | Marketing | 2017 | $79.00 | Calibre | Miscellaneous | 2023 | $75.00 | CircleCI | Infrastructure | 2017 | $10.00 | Cleantalk | Data | 2017 | $28.00 | Discord | Marketing | 2023 | $0.00 | Dmarc Digests | Operations | 2022 | $10.00 | DNSimple | Infrastructure | 2017 | $9.00 | DNSHelper | Miscellaneous | 2022 | $50.00 | F5Bot | Marketing | 2022 | $0.00 | Fathom | Infrastructure | 2020 | $45.00 | Feedbin | Productivity | 2020 | $5.00 | FullContact | Data | 2017 | $99.00 | GitHub | Infrastructure | 2017 | $4.00 | GitHub Actions | Infrastructure | 2020 | $0.00 | GitHub Issues | Productivity | 2017 | $0.00 | Github Copilot | Productivity | 2022 | $8.00 | Golinks | Productivity | 2022 | $0.00 | Google Suite | Infrastructure | 2018 | $25.00 | Google Web Risk API | Data | 2023 | $0.00 | Helpscout | Marketing | 2022 | $100.00 | Heroku Dynos | Infrastructure | 2017 | $550.00 | Heroku Postgres | Infrastructure | 2017 | $300.00 | Heroku Redis | Infrastructure | 2018 | $129.00 | icon.horse | Data | 2023 | $9.00 | Iframely | Data | 2022 | $29.00 | imgix | Infrastructure | 2023 | $200.00 | Ivory | Marketing | 2023 | $5.00 | Jasper | Marketing | 2023 | $49.00 | Loom | Productivity | 2023 | $10.00 | Mailgun | Infrastructure | 2017 | $220.00 | Mimestream | Productivity | 2023 | $5.00 | Mono Lisa | Miscellaneous | 2021 | $0.00 | Notion | Productivity | 2018 | $100.00 | OpenAI | Infrastructure | 2023 | $0.00 | Pagerduty | Infrastructure | 2020 | $25.00 | PayPal | Operations | 2023 | $0.00 | PhysicalAddress | Miscellaneous | 2018 | $8.00 | Pika | Design | 2024 | $12.00 | PopSQL | Productivity | 2021 | $0.00 | Postico | Productivity | 2018 | $0.00 | Postmark | Infrastructure | 2018 | $1,450.00 | Quickbooks | Finance | 2022 | $30.00 | Redis Enterprise Cloud | Infrastructure | 2023 | $250.00 | Resend | Infrastructure | 2024 | $20.00 | Savvycal | Operations | 2022 | $20.00 | Screen Studio | Productivity | 2023 | $0.00 | SendGrid | Infrastructure | 2023 | $25.00 | Sentry | Infrastructure | 2018 | $115.00 | Ship | Productivity | 2018 | $8.00 | Sketch | Design | 2019 | $9.00 | Slack | Productivity | 2017 | $20.00 | Statuspage | Operations | 2019 | $29.00 | Stripe | Infrastructure | 2017 | $0.00 | Texts | Productivity | 2021 | $15.00 | Things | Productivity | 2018 | $0.00 | Twitter Blue | Marketing | 2022 | $8.00 | Twitter API | Miscellany | 2020 | $100.00 | Typefully | Marketing | 2022 | $10.00 | Valtown | Infrastructure | 2023 | $0.00 | Vercel | Infrastructure | 2022 | $120.00 | VS Code | Productivity | 2021 | $0.00 | Zapier | Productivity | 2022 | $30.00 |
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The most important resource I have is my energy, and being able to trade X dollars (where X is any number less than a hundred) for even trivial amounts of energy is an absolute no-brainer.
When I launched Buttondown, AWS Simple Email Service was notoriously low-quality and Postmark did not support broadcast emails. Mailgun was the choice I went with, and there are still many customers using Mailgun’s rails who have custom domain records set up that I don’t have the heart (or incentive) to migrate.
I like having redundancy — if one provider were to go down or drastically change rates it would be trivial for me to migrate — but if I were starting Buttondown from scratch I would likely just have everything run through Postmark.
Some specific choices I made to roll my own: