IronMic SaaS Services We Use

IronMic SaaS Services We Use

At IronMic, we are a small team, three total. We try to run a tight ship, but we do pay for certain SaaS services. These tools improve our lives and allow us to run the business daily.

Services we pay for:

Google Work - $18

We defaulted to using Google Suite. Since the early days, we've been using Gmail, and we use Google Drive, Hangouts, and Google Calendar. There have been chats around moving to Hey for email, but we are waiting to decide once they launch the business options.

Still, for any startup, Google Work is worth the investment. Offers email, calendar, and docs.

Fathom Analytics - $12

Fathom Analytics is replacing Google Analytics on all of our sites sooner or later. We have started making a move slowly to focus on privacy as a company. While its an added expense, it's easy to provide privacy and prevent cross-site tracking that Google does with Analytics.

Digital Ocean - $180~

The IronMic services run off of Digital Ocean. The costs range month to month, but we DO Droplets and Managed Databases.

Collectively, we have used Digital Ocean for well over ten years. We've hosted personal websites, side projects, and now IronMic.

Quickbooks - $30

We use Quickbooks for all our bookkeeping. While I am not a fan of Intuit being a massive company or how pricey the service can be, it is the best in bookkeeping.

If you have a recommendation for another app similar to or better than Quickbooks, please share it! Tweet me @leonhitchens.

Stripe - Percent Based

You could have guessed, but we use Stripe for our payment processing. It's unmatched for its API and newer features they've been rolling out.

SLK Media, the parent company of IronMic, used Stripe Atlas to do the LLC process. In IronMic 2.0, we are looking at using their new billing management system.

Headlime - $29 Lifetime Account

We bought a lifetime account for Headlime. The appeal of using Headlime for the AI writing. Headlime writes the Twitter posts, Duck Duck Go Ads, and even parts of our new landing page.

Hands down, this is a great tool to get a starting point when writing. I often edit it to match our style and needs, but overall hit the mark with the copy.

Other services not paid:

Slack

Our choice of communications. It allows us to chat, work, and get notifications from multiple other services.

We have been using Slack for years now and use it as our go-to group messaging - work and personal related.

AirTable

A new addition to our companies workflow. The app is being used to generate new landing pages based on industry or topic.

This allows me to edit the content on a page within a tablet; no coding or frontend editing is needed. Plus, it means we don't have to use a CMS like WordPress for our frontend marketing site.

Notion

Another newer addition. Notion is moving to replace Trello, which we used for a long time. The features Notion offers replace Trello and adds wiki functionality, which would let us document processes.

This still isn't set in stone, we are still using Trello daily, but one day may make the jump. For that reason, I kept this listed as free. When we upgrade to paid, it'll be around $24 a month.

ConvertKit

Another new addition! I am working on replacing Mailchimp for our email marketing. I like how Convertkit only uses tags to organize subscribers, plus the website is much more user friendly than Mailchimp.

I am transferring subscribers over and our automation, so by the new year, we should be using Convertkit.

Small chat

Small chat will get pushed live with IronMic 2.0. It's our new chat support system replacing Facebook. I am a big fan of the app because it allows us to chat with users on the site through Slack.

We are currently using the Free plan, but when we go live, we may decide to upgrade to help support the company.


Final Thoughts

IronMic v2 is around the corner. Some of these services will move along and be replaced with other services. The main one that will become a thing of the past is Digital Ocean. While it's important to use currently, we are working on replacing it with more affordable options that'll also make IronMic v2 more stable and feature rich.

If you have any recommends please tweet them to me @leonhitchens or to our @ironmicfm account.