The 67 tools & services we use to run our startup

Running a company requires very few tools and services, however there are quite a few that do make things much easier and faster.

We get asked regularly what tools we use for various tasks, so below we’ve listed out all the tools and services we as a company (and individually) use to make the magic happen here at Baremetrics.

One interesting thing I noticed while putting all of this together is that the large majority of these we pay for…we use basically zero free tools. That’s important to note because as a business, we choose to use tools that actually make a difference in our daily workflow. Free tools rarely do that…otherwise they’d be able to charge for it.

On top of that, nearly the majority of these we pay $50/mo+ for. If you build anything for businesses, you should be charging for it and you should be solving a big enough problem that you can actually pull off charging $50/mo+. If you can’t get anyone to pay at least that, you’re probably not solving a big enough pain point.

But I digress! On with the listing…

Side note: If Product Hunt is your jam, here’s a Collection with nearly all of these tools.

Business

• 1Password Teams — Amazingly, a lot of business apps don’t have multi-user support and thus we’re left needing to share some passwords. 1Password Teams makes that really easy.
• Appear.in — Whenever we need to do quick video chats outside of our own team, we use Appear.in…it’s basically Google Hangouts, except it actually works.
• Baremetrics — Obviously. 😉
• Clubhouse — Project management software that we’ve actually been able to stick with. Just the right amount of constraints and flexibility.
• Dropbox — The majority of our company-wide file storage and sharing happens in Dropbox.
• Dropbox Paper — Any text document goes here. If they’d build a spreadsheet app, we’d abandon Google Docs immediately.
• Earth Class Mail — Street address for us, since we’re a remote company. Also magically does mail scanning, which is my favorite thing on earth.
• G Suite — Email, calendar, spreadsheets and some file storage are all here.
• HelloSign — Any document that needs to be signed goes through HelloSign.
• OmniFocus — How I stay sane juggling all the things.
• QuickBooks Online — Bookkeeping software.
• Slack – Where 99% of our team communication happens.
• Soulver — Essentially an obscenely powerful calculator. I use this to think out problems, algorithms, business scenarios and more.
• Stripe — How we accept payments.
• Workable — Recruiting software. We use this to manage job postings and applications.
• Zapier — I’m honestly not even sure how to sum up what Zapier does for us. It touches nearly every part of our business from marketing to bookkeeping to customer follow ups. So. Much. Stuff.

Engineering

• Amazon Web Services — We specifically use their S3 and Machine Learning services. S3 for backup storage and serving some assets on our marketing site and Machine Learning for…something top secret that’s in the works. 😎
• Atom — The text editor of choice for most of our engineers.
• CircleCI — Continuous integration and testing.
• Clearbit — Provides an unbelievable amount of person and company data that’s used extensively throughout our app.
• Cloudflare — This does a whole host of things around file delivery, SSL, security and speed optimization.
• Cloud 66 — Manages our deployment process across lots and lots of servers.
• DataDog — Server/infrastructure monitoring.
• Digital Ocean — Our marketing site lives here.
• GitHub — Seems to not do this enough justice to say “git hosting” but ultimately all our code and versioning is stored here.
• Heroku — We’ve got a couple of really small micro-services hosted here.
• Honeybadger – Application error monitoring.
• Imgix — Image optimization on the marketing site.
• iTerm — A more powerful command line app for macOS.
• Mailgun — Email delivery for app emails as well as for our Recover feature.
• Mapbox — Used for generating location maps on our Customer Profiles feature.
• Packet — We have a slew of baremetal servers here and it’s where all of the main Baremetrics app lives.
• PagerDuty — Automated on-call scheduling and incident escalation.
• Pusher — Used for realtime data streaming to our dashboard.
• Quandl — This is the data source behind our currency conversion feature.
• Readme.io — Powers our API documentation and it’s magical.
• RethinkDB — Our primary database.
• Segment — Lets us merge all data streams in to a single source.
• Sidekiq Enterprise — The number of background jobs we run is borderline offensive. Sidekiq makes that cake.
• TextMate — Old habits die hard…

Marketing

• Buffer — Manages our social media scheduling for both @Baremetrics and @Shpigford.
• ConvertKit — We use this mainly for sending our weekly newsletter, but also for some other things like marketing drip campaigns and new-feature notifications.
• Crowdcast — This is the webinar tool I always wanted. We use this to do customer webinars as well as our Founders Live Q&A.
• Final Cut Pro X — For producing various marketing videos.
• GIF Brewery — Makes quick work of GIF creation for customer support issues, feature animations for marketing and more!
• Google Analytics — Provides some insights in to user acquisition, though we tend to default to Mixpanel much more.
• GoSquared — For live web traffic analytics.
• HitTail — Surfaces potentially productive keywords we could produce content for.
• Mixpanel — How we track user acquisition channels and product usage.
• Moz — How we track our SEO efforts.
• Screenflow — For recording our screens when doing demos or creating marketing videos.
• Simplecast — Podcast publishing.
• Soundcloud – Audio hosting for our podcasts.
• Trello — Basically the only usable way we’ve found to stay on top of content planning and scheduling.
• Ulysses — My personal favorite writing app.
• Upscribe — Embeds newsletter signup forms on Medium articles.
• Zencastr — Podcast recording for interviews. I use this extensively for Founder Chats.

Customer Success

• Grasshopper — For our 1-800 number, which essentially no-one but recruiters and off-shore dev shops use, is there primarily as a comfort to potential new customers (“Hey, they’ve got a phone number!”).
• Intercom — If apps could get married, we’d totally tie the knot with Intercom. Every bit of communication with our customers, from onboarding to support and everything in between, flows through Intercom. We’ve written an entire guide on how to grow your business with Intercom.
• Promoter.io — Quantitatively tracking customer feedback is a key part of how we make sure we’re serving customers well. Promoter.io powers all of that. We’ve written extensively as well about how we use Promoter.io.
• StatusPage — Whenever we have an outage or a service interruption, we update our status page to keep customers in the loop.
• Wistia — Any videos we produce are hosted on Wistia, which we then use throughout our app and in customer communication.

Design

• After Effects — We use this to mockup UI animations and interactions.
• FullStory — This gives us direct insight in to how customers are using the app. It’s also really great for seeing what users were doing leading up to an error they received or pinpointing when they’re getting frustrated in-app.
• IconJar — We use icons in all sorts of ways and IconJar helps organize them.
• Illustrator — For all your vector-editing needs.
• Sketch — The defacto UI design tool on our team.

So, what about you? What tools are indespensible for you and your business?

Frequently Asked Questions

• What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery for subscription businesses? Automated failed payment recovery tools retry declined charges, update expired card details, and send dunning emails to reduce involuntary churn without manual intervention.For subscription businesses, involuntary churn caused by failed payments is one of the most preventable revenue leaks. Baremetrics includes a built-in feature called Recover that automatically retries failed payments and sends smart dunning sequences to customers with billing issues. This means your team recovers revenue passively, without building custom workflows or stitching together separate tools. If you are running on Stripe, Braintree, or Recurly, Recover connects directly to your existing payment processor with no additional setup. For SaaS companies tracking $10K or more in MRR, even a modest improvement in payment recovery compounds significantly over time.
• How can I measure and reduce involuntary churn caused by failed payments? Involuntary churn caused by failed payments can be measured by tracking how much MRR is lost to declined cards versus deliberate cancellations, then targeting that segment with automated recovery sequences.Start by separating your churned MRR into voluntary churn and involuntary churn in your subscription analytics platform. Customers who cancel intentionally need a different response than subscribers whose cards simply expired or hit a limit. Baremetrics surfaces failed payment data alongside your broader churn metrics so you can see exactly how much revenue is at risk at any point. From there, the Recover feature handles automatic retries and customer-facing dunning emails, so fewer subscriptions lapse before the billing issue is even noticed. Reducing involuntary churn is one of the highest-ROI levers available to subscription teams without touching pricing or acquisition.
• How do I run pricing experiments and monitor the impact on MRR in real time? To test pricing changes and track their effect on MRR, you need subscription analytics that can segment revenue by pricing tier, billing interval, and cohort so you can isolate the impact of each experiment.Before changing any pricing, establish a clear baseline: know your current MRR by plan, your trial-to-paid conversion rate, and your average LTV per tier. When you roll out a new price point or packaging change, Baremetrics lets you monitor new MRR, expansion MRR, and churn rate in real time across customer segments. This makes it possible to spot whether a price increase is improving revenue per account or accelerating cancellations before the effect becomes irreversible. Tracking ARPA alongside churn rate by cohort gives you the clearest signal on whether a pricing experiment is working.
• What are the essential subscription analytics tools a SaaS finance team needs to track MRR accurately? A SaaS finance team needs tools that automatically calculate MRR, break it into new, expansion, contraction, and churned components, and update in real time from the payment processor without manual data pulls.The core requirement is a single source of truth for subscription revenue that does not require spreadsheet maintenance or engineering support. Baremetrics connects directly to Stripe, Braintree, and Recurly and instantly surfaces a full MRR dashboard, churn analytics, LTV, and revenue forecasting with zero setup. Beyond raw MRR tracking, finance leads benefit from:Automatic segmentation of MRR movements by new, expansion, contraction, and churned revenueForecasting tools that project future MRR based on current growth and churn trendsBenchmark data to compare your churn rate and growth against similar-stage SaaS companiesThese capabilities replace hours of manual reporting and give finance teams confidence in the numbers they share with investors and leadership.
• How can SaaS founders benchmark their churn rate against similar subscription businesses? SaaS founders can benchmark their churn rate by comparing it against aggregated data from subscription businesses at a similar MRR range, growth stage, and business model.Generic benchmarks pulled from blog posts are rarely useful because churn varies significantly by price point, customer segment, and billing interval. Baremetrics publishes open benchmark data drawn from hundreds of real SaaS companies, allowing founders to compare their monthly churn rate, LTV, and ARPA against businesses with comparable metrics. This kind of peer-level benchmarking helps you answer whether your churn is a product problem, a customer success problem, or simply the baseline for your market segment. Knowing where you stand relative to similar subscription businesses is also useful context when presenting metrics to investors or setting internal retention targets for your growth team.

Josh Pigford

Josh is most famous as the founder of Baremetrics. However, long before Baremetrics and until today, Josh has been a maker, builder, and entrepreneur. His career set off in 2003 building a pair of link directories, ReallyDumbStuff and ReallyFunArcade. Before he sold those for profits, he had already started his next set of projects. As a design major, he began consulting on web design projects. That company eventually morphed into Sabotage Media, which has been the shell company for many of his projects since. Some of his biggest projects before Baremetrics were TrackThePack, Deck Foundry, PopSurvey, and Temper. The pain points he experienced as PopSurvey and Temper took off were the reason he created Baremetrics. Currently, he's dedicated to Maybe, the OS for your personal finances.