Expenses
Color
Name
Service
Purpose
Cost
Total Cost
Email Hosting
Google Apps hosts email for the team as well as spreadsheets for research and expense tracking.
$50/year
Website CMS
Siteleaf makes it possible to easily update the marketing website without needing to deploy the app.
$5/month
Website Hosting
The marketing website is hosted on GitHub Pages, which is free, static, and version-controlled.
free
Private SCM
GitHub hosts the source code of the app and GitHub Issues is used to track bugs, features, and milestones.
$7/month
Web App Server
The web app currently runs on Heroku, which is very easy to set up and maintain, but very expensive.
$34.50/month
Web App Database
The web app uses a PostgreSQL database running on Heroku, which includes automatic backups.
$50/month
SSL Management
ExpeditedSSL installed the SSL certificate and automatically renews it each year. The service is a set-it-and-forget-it.
$10/month
Log Management
Papertrail pulls in all the server logs from Cushion, so I can easily query them when I need to dig deeper on an issue.
$7/mo
Exception Tracking
Sentry alerts me of any uncaught exceptions in Cushion and provides all the details I need to debug them.
free
Continuous Delivery
Codeship handles testing, compiling, and deployment of Cushion. It’s incredibly flexible and easy to use.
free
Asset Hosting
The marketing website, javascript files, stylesheets, and images are all stored in AWS S3, which literally costs pennies a month.
$0.42/month
Asset CDN
The asset files are served by AWS CloudFront, a content delivery service that greatly improves transfer speeds.
$0.47/month
Email Marketing
The first newsletter update email was sent using Campaign Monitor.
$15.07
Chat / Notifications
Slack is a great for chat, but also perfect for centralizing notifications from other services, like Stripe and Intercom.
$80/year
Email Marketing
The newsletter update emails are sent using Mailchimp. It’s easy and powerful.
$50/month
Email Delivery
Cushion uses Mandrill to send triggered emails, like password resets or failed payment follow-ups.
free
Metrics
Hosted Graphite serves the dashboard for StatsD server metrics and user activity.
$19/month
Metrics
Librato serves the dashboard for server metrics and user activity, pulling in data from logs and StatsD.
$19/month
Support
Intercom is essential to communicating with Cushion users, providing customer support, user analytics, and in-app messaging.
$175/month
Code Review
Code Climate reviews the app code, grades it, and highlights areas that could be improved. This isn’t a necessary service, but useful for a clean codebase.
$49/month
Web Worker Server
The web workers run background jobs, like generating downloadable backups and requesting 3rd party services.
$74.40/month
Redis Database
The Redis database is used to queue and manage background jobs. Redis Cloud is a one-click Heroku add-on, but very expensive.
$10/month
Revenue Analytics
Baremetrics integrates with Stripe to analyze revenue and monitor payment activity.
$29/month
Scheduler
The scheduler spawns background jobs every 10 minutes to import new clients, projects, and invoices from Harvest for the auto-import integration.
$1/mo
Website Fonts
The marketing website’s fonts are self-hosted and licensed from MyFonts. The header font is Effra Bold by Dalton Maag and the body font is FF Tisa Pro by Mitja Miklavčič.
$300.51
Web App Fonts
The web app fonts are self-hosted and licensed from Just Another Foundry. The fonts include several styles from the Facit typeface by Tim Ahrens and Shoko Mugikura of Just Another Foundry.
$500.94
Web App Profiler
Skylight profiles server requests and pinpoints which ones are the slowest and which are the heaviest.
$20/month
Flickity JS library
Flickity is *the* responsive and touch-enabled carousel library by David DeSandro. We use it on the marketing page to cycle through user testimonials.
$25
Wildcard SSL Certificate
The wildcard SSL certificate secures all of Cushion’s subdomains. Namecheap came recommended, but there are plenty of other certificate resellers.
$99/year
Stickers
To spread the word in person, we ordered stickers from Sticker Mule. The proof was approved same-day and the stickers arrived 5 days later.
$59
Advertising
We tried Google Adwords for advertising, but quickly realized that we’re better off spreading the word in other ways while our budget is low.
$10/day
Design Process Hosting
We started posting design process shots to Dribbble as a way to reach a wider segment of the design community.
$20/year
$447.46/month