At Across, we wanted to see how many other technology companies and service providers we use on a regular basis. The answer was way more than we thought. For a seed stage 2 person startup, we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month (we’re on the free plans for many of them). And, this excludes libraries in our product. It’s self-inflicted, but a lot of tools nonetheless.

I'm sure this number will grow as we hire employees and have to buy HR and IT software as well (and I'm sure I forgot a few existing tools on this list). We're interested to hear what other startup stacks look like!

Productivity & Project Management

• GSuite ($12 / month) - Standard email, file storage in Drive, analysis in Sheets, and presentations in Slides
• Slack ($13 / month) - Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels
• Airtable (free) - CRM to track our sales funnel
• Notion ($16 / month) - Storing interview notes, brainstorming product and feature ideas

Development & Design

• GitHub ($7 / month) - Version control / source management
• Trello (free) - Product roadmap, issue tracking
• Figma ($24 / month) - Designing product mocks
• Miscellaneous IDEs (free) - Sublime, Vim, VSCode
• Robo 3T (free) - MongoDB GUI

Analytics

• Mixpanel (free) - Front and backend analytics. We are on a startup plan so receive Mixpanel for free for up to 250K MTUs
• Sentry ($26 / month) - Error logging and reporting
• Fullstory (free) - Session replay. We are on a startup plan so receive Fullstory for free

Payments, Hosting & Authentication

• Stripe (pricing depends on volume) - Accepting payments
• Heroku (free) - Hosting. We are still using free dynos
• Firebase (free) - Authentication. We are still on the free plan
• Cloudflare ($20 / month) - CDN + DNS

Sales & Marketing, Customer Support

• Hubspot ($45 per month) - Email outreach and contact management. We are on the Startup plan so receive Hubspot 90% off
• Drift (free) - Chat widget on our website. We've stuck with the basic free plan
• Mailchimp (free) - Automated emails on signups
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) - Finding leads to contact
• SalesQL ($29 / month) - Finding email addresses for leads
• Zoom (free) - Web conferencing
• Twilio (pricing depends on volume) - Business phone number, used in conjunction with FounderPhone
• Boomerang (free) - Reminders to follow up with people in email
• FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)
• Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Discord - Use these channels to communicate with customers

Finance & Legal

• Brex (free) - Business cash account and credit cards. Free until we scale

We're interested to hear what other startup stacks look like!

Across turns Slack into a powerful customer support system that scales. Create tickets, auto-respond to customer questions, and manage your support team. Learn more at acrossapp.com.