Most "best tools for your startup" lists are written by companies that have already billed their first million. They recommend a CRM with automation rules to someone with eleven customers and a spreadsheet that works fine.
This post is about the first year, before the first hire, when every subscription comes out of the same account as payroll and every new tool costs an afternoon you could have spent on product.
The rule before the list
A tool is worth it when it meets one of these three conditions:
- It replaces work you already do by hand every week.
- It does something you cannot do without it, as opposed to something you can do slightly worse.
- Someone requires it: the law, a customer, a bank.
Anything that meets none of the three is a bet on the future. Bets are allowed, as long as you know that is what they are.
The second rule is less comfortable. A tool costs its price plus the hours to set it up, the hours to maintain it, and the effort of getting your data out the day you want to leave. A €29-a-month tool that takes two days to configure has cost far more than €29 in its first month.
The nine
1. A repository and continuous integration
Not optional, and not much of a decision. GitHub or GitLab, whichever you already know, with the CI included in the free plan.
What it costs: nothing at first. Free plans easily cover a team of one to five.
The usual mistake: building an elaborate deployment system before anyone uses the product. A deploy that runs with one command in four minutes will last you much longer than you expect.
2. An infrastructure provider
AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, Railway, Fly. The choice matters less than the debate it attracts. What matters is not building something only its author can maintain.
What it costs: between €20 and €200 a month in the first year, depending on whether you need a managed database.
The usual mistake: the credits. Nearly every startup program hands out €5,000 to €100,000 in credits, which pushes people to build on proprietary services that get very expensive once the credit runs out. The credit is free money, and so is the bill that comes after it is not.
3. Payments
Stripe, or Stripe. In Europe, with the tax situation of a SaaS selling across countries, there are few serious alternatives that do not involve building a layer you do not want to build.
What it costs: a per-transaction fee. There is no fixed cost, so it only shows up once there is revenue, which is exactly right.
What people underestimate: subscription status needs a single source of truth. As soon as your product keeps its own copy of "this customer is up to date" and someone can edit it by hand, you start getting strange incidents nobody can reproduce.
4. Transactional email
The emails the product sends: verification, password resets, alerts. Resend, Postmark, SES.
What it costs: €0 to €20 a month at first-year volumes.
The usual mistake: sending them from the same domain and reputation as your marketing emails. A campaign marked as spam drags the password reset emails down with it, and that becomes a product incident.
5. Product analytics
Knowing what people do inside the product. PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or, at low volume, queries against your own database.
What it costs: the free tiers hold up well. PostHog's hosted free tier is generous.
What you need: three well-chosen events, not fifty badly placed ones. The event that marks a customer's first result is worth more than all the others combined, because it predicts renewal.
6. Somewhere to talk to customers
This is our industry, so take this section with that in mind: in year one, all you need is for conversations not to live in anyone's personal inbox.
A shared inbox with a status and an owner covers 90% of what you need until there are three of you. An email alias does not work: it hands out copies, not responsibility, and in the first week there is already a question nobody answered because each person thought the other had it.
What it costs: €0 to €50 a month.
When you need more: when half the replies depend on data sitting on another screen. At that point, organization is no longer the bottleneck.
7. Public documentation
A help center that search engines can index. It does not need an expensive tool. Twenty well-written public articles anywhere beat two hundred on a platform with its own search.
Why it belongs in year one: it is the only part of support that works while you sleep, and it is content search engines can index. A share of every SaaS's search traffic ends up on its help articles.
8. Team password management
1Password, Bitwarden. Boring and not optional.
What it costs: €3 to €8 per person per month.
Why you cannot skip it: the alternative is a shared document, which is the first thing an audit asks for and the first thing to leak. With two people it already pays for itself.
9. Accounting
An accountant or software, depending on the country and the volume. In Spain, with e-invoicing and the new obligations coming into force, this is no place to improvise.
What it costs: €60 to €250 a month.
What people underestimate: the time. Handling invoices by hand takes three to six hours a month that nobody logs anywhere.
The three you do not need yet
A CRM
With fewer than fifty customers, a spreadsheet with name, contact, signup date and status does the same job, is faster to read and needs no setup.
A CRM starts to earn its place when two people need to see the same status of the same opportunity and one of them was not on the call. Before that, it is a place to store data only its author reads.
Marketing automation
Sequences, lead scoring, branching flows. All of it solves a volume problem you do not have.
What works in year one: writing by hand to the people who sign up. It does not scale, and that is why it works. It is the only way to find out why people arrive and why they leave.
A project management platform
With three people, a shared list and one conversation a day are enough to coordinate. A board with columns, tags, estimates and sprints is process for a problem that shows up somewhere past eight or ten people.
You need one when someone does something somebody else had already done. Feeling disorganized is not enough.
The question before signing
One question, and it works for all twelve:
Which specific task that I do this week goes away if I buy this?
If the answer takes a while, or if it is "we would be better organized", the tool adds work instead of replacing it. In the first year of a SaaS, the scarce resource is the attention of the two or three people building it, more than the money.
For everything you do buy, check from day one how the data comes out. You may never leave, but knowing changes what you are willing to put in.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a SaaS spend on tools in its first year?
Between €100 and €600 a month, mostly on infrastructure and accounting. If every other tool adds up to more than those two, you have probably bought something for a problem you do not have yet.
Do I need a helpdesk from day one?
You need conversations to stay out of personal inboxes. A shared inbox with status and an owner covers that, whether it is a simple helpdesk or something even simpler. An email alias does not. What is worth having from day one is public documentation.
Which tools are free for good?
Code hosting, continuous integration and product analytics have free tiers that easily cover the first year. Payments have no fixed fee. Infrastructure and accounting are not free, and it is better not to pretend they are.
When do I need a CRM?
When two people need to see the same status of the same opportunity and one of them was not on the call. With fewer than fifty customers and one person selling, a spreadsheet does the same job.
Are AWS or Google Cloud credits a trap?
The credit itself is fine. The problem is that it pushes you to build on proprietary services that get expensive once it runs out. Use it for things you could move to another provider without pain: compute, storage, a standard managed database. Avoid what only exists in that cloud.
Does an AI support agent belong in the first year?
Yes, once the same questions fill half the inbox and you have documentation to answer them. Before that, there is no volume to automate.
