Those who run dev shops – what products do you pay for?
Those who are running/part-of development shops which build web/mobile products - what products do you pay for ?
I don't run one anymore, but when I did.
- Basecamp, CRM + marketing automation, email services, SEO (moz), google business services, twilio (phone/sms) and AWS were all common.
I'd also pay for plug-ins and stuff when it made more sense then building stuff. But those are kinda the base level things I always had available. SEO tooling was really critical when doing web dev work for people, that way I could show proof of results from before and after.
Part of the key for me was to make sure I looked like a firm even when I was just one person but wanting to grow. So I always kept a professional website, business email addresses, phone numbers etc. I would never lie if someone asked me a direct question about how many people worked at the company, but if they said how big are you guys, I'd usually give number of projects done in the past 3 months or 12 months etc. And I'd include all the little projects even if I did them as favors or as pre-sales activity to gain a larger deal. As long as I was doing it professionally and to further the business it counted IMO.
On a somehow related note: Am I alone in thinking that sometimes a lot of software development feels almost like a giant pyramid scheme with multiple steps in between? You build software for companies that build software and provide services to companies that build software for companies that...
AWS, Losant (iot platform), Gsuite, Pipedrive, resharper, Sublime Text, AdWords, Adobe Premiere Essentials, password management, Xcode, stock photography/video, monitoring services
aws, jira stack, twilio, visual studio, resharper, mongo 3t, ms sql server, various sql monitoring/helpful tools, google suite, 1password, etc
Loads of stuff. Github; Slack; npm; Azure; segment; aws; Microsoft office; zendesk; jira; Travis; Appveyor; filestack; browserstack; probably a lot more stuff i forgot!
If you're going to pay for just one thing only, it should be Datadog.
Linode/DO vps, aws, technical books/videos
Azure, office. Visual studio, datagrip, linkedin, vsts