Simplicity as a Service

The more I read or follow new services and startup offering to sort out my life one subscription at a time, more I'm convenience that, majority of them are just grabbing the user's money and not solving the problem at all.

Not to pointing fingers, but look around you today, I bet you have tons of subscriptions under your credit card, mine is on today needs is around USD$100.00 a month, just for personal use, it dropped from around USD$250.00, more about that later.

Those services includes, but not limited to: Automation, Leisure, Wellness, Lifestyle , Entertainment, Stock Management, all sorts of things based on my personal perspective and needs.

Some of those services are great for people with no time, no technical skills. But I don't.

Little bit of my past problems

As I mentioned earlier, some services had to cancel the subscription in the begining of the year, mostly because some of the were lagging behind the constant needs and changes in my life and advancements of my career changes and personal goals; I had more free time to implement my own.

One of them took me a week 40 hours of work that was costing me $120.00 monthly to have it.

Daily I compare stocks, predictions and analysts opinions around stock market and automate the investment based on those decisions, the market call this robot trading. It's an expensive, but to me made more sense to use a service that manage that in a reliable way, rather than just implement my own in the time of the decision.

As life progressed and the money wallet dropped, that's where you have to action and implement my own.

Opened a new account at a cloud provider, as today is so easy to do. Using Pareto Analysis I decided on what features/functionalities will replicate most of my needs to make the decision.

• No UI required
• Grab data sources and parse from public rss feeds
• Make the NLP works: Categorize the news, summarize, simplify, relationship extraction, Taxonomy, Questioning/Answering.
• Create 2 API endpoints to be able to call from my phone using iOS shortcuts.

After a new tries and errors, I manage to successfully replace the major features I consider I couldn't live with from the ex-SasS provider.

Post production and running for more than 4 days so far, I'd say that it's running smoothly. The cloud provider of choice is no secret, that offers what I needed, be reliable.

Another service that I took off was the one I use to compare cinema tickets and save some money, I've realized the money I've saved was like the same paid to be served. It didn't make any sense to me to keep paying it.

Usually I like to go to the theaters with my wife, comparing prices, perks, deals, coupons is quite a hassle, I stopped using this service and did the same thing again, another $30 bucks less in the expense budget.

What I've learnt from those SasS providers?

• They offer a great deal of value for people with IT skills.
• Cloud providers are maturing a lot the idea of Serverless, you just need to worry about your code and that's a huge shift for anyone.
• They lack on keep up when the customer base is growing and outpacing their capability in responding in time for you.
• Flight services that offer deals are quite a thieves. They can steal a substantial amount of your time, sorting out for you as you could easy sorting out directly with the career.
• If you don't have any idea how and where to start, Github is the way to go, you can find great deal of repository with people like me that just don't want keep paying for services that are clueless or not paying attention for the customer that you just need to implement yourself.
• Keeping things simple is hard, humans are bias for complying with complexity. Even when implementing my own stuff I tend to complexity and re-write at least 3 times to learn to do better.
• Listing to music is an expensive these days, I need to cut off completly this expense. Luckily, I found my classic iPod with 80GB full of music, that's going to be my next thing to migrate.

Lessons learnt

Apple devices are definitely less capable then an Android devices these days, but guess what? They are so simple to use and so reliable that they sell more than any Android device vendor out there. So which means that less is definitely more.

Doesn't matter if you're a software provider or a SasS wanna be like me, keeping simple and solving one problem at a time, still validates the modern days. You can only stick to one person at time when you're talking to. Same applies for life.

Time is a finite resource, if you throw away some bucks to save your time to watch youtube videos or stalk on other people's life, well,... you're just throwing money away.

Keep it simple folks.