We try to run a lean operation at Mailbrew, but we are suckers for great tools that improve our daily workflows, so we pay for quite a few of them each month.
Being small (just 3 people), the cost of switching services is almost negligible, so we try new stuff regularly and do switch when we see a clear improvement.
Here is a list of everything we happily pay for.
Missive
$15/month ⨉ 3 = $45/month.
Collaborative email on top of G Suite. The main thing we pay for is a comment box below each email thread. It allows us to quickly discuss emails without forwarding or copy/pasting in Slack. It also allows us to edit drafts collaboratively and have multiple team inboxes for invoices, support, and other stuff.
We pay for the Productive plan because of one feature: Rules. They allow us to automatically categorize emails and be more granular with notifications.
Notion
$8/month ⨉ 3 = $24/month.
It's our team wiki. We write memos, meeting notes, drafts for blog posts, and everything that needs to be shared async for feedback. We also used to put tasks here but recently moved to Linear (more on this below).
It's an amazing value, but we were close to ditching it because of how slow it has become. We still have to find something that delivers the same great feature set and flexibility while improving speed and reliability.
Linear
$8/month ⨉ 3 = $24/month.
We put our tasks here. It's a newcomer, but it's so good that we have already committed to it for a year.
It completely revolutionized the way we work with its flexibility, speed, customizability, and great GitHub integration.
If you connect it to GitHub and open a pull request with a task-specific name, task and PR get linked. When the PR is merged, the task is automatically marked as done.
I would invest in this company if I had the chance. It's so much better than everything else I ever tried in this space.
Vercel
$20/month ⨉ 3 = $60/month.
Vercel deploys and hosts our frontends and serverless functions.
It's a bit pricier than we'd like, and the pricing does not really make sense. Why do we have to pay per team member instead of build minutes, bandwidth, and compute?
With all that being said, we love the product philosophy, simplicity, and integration with GitHub. Having automatic deploys for all commits, together with automatic task-linking to Linear for PRs, is code-review Nirvana.
SavvyCal
$12/month ⨉ 2 = $24/month.
We use it to schedule our calls. It's a better Calendly, made by a solo indie developer that we're happy to support.
The product is super-intuitive, and its feature set is increasing at a great pace with features that massively improve our workflows.
Plausible Analytics
$12/month.
It's a privacy-focused website analytics tool that replaces Google Analytics.
The most impressive thing is how better the insights we get from it are, thanks to some great UX, despite its privacy-respecting stance.
No surprise, they have been growing like crazy.
Mailbrew
$10/month.
We pay for this, even if we are the ones making it, to test our Stripe Integration.
We use Mailbrew to receive a couple of digests with dedicated Twitter Searches that keep us updated on social mentions of our product.
Super
$12/month.
This turns Notion documents into their own websites with a dedicated domain. We use it for our press kit and support docs.