Here’s a question for you. What subscription based, cloud software do you use and love? I made a list of services I use personally or subscribe to with my companies CreativeMornings and Tattly. I was surprised to see how long the list is:
Freshbooks for all my invoicing needs (also does time tracking but I don’t need that at this point in my career)
Squarespace for my co-working space website and smaller CreativeMornings related project sites.
Helpscout is what we use for all of our Tattly support.
Dropbox is where we store all of our files. I would not be able to sleep without it.
Mailchimp is our service of choice to maintain our mailing lists and sending our newsletters.
Shutterstock is our stock photography service of choice.
JustworksHR takes care of our CreativeMornings payroll, benefits and HR related services.
Trinet takes care of our Tattly payroll, insurance needs and HR Management.
Netsuite helps us keep track of our Tattly inventory, our financials and we use it as our CRM. It’s a beast.
Shopify is what powers our Tattly e-commerce site.
Typekit makes sure we look good on the web with designy fonts.
Mediatemple hosts our CreativeMornings website
Contactually helps me organize and keep on top of all my contacts.
Sanebox is the best $5 I spend every month. It filters out non-important email.
Brandboom is our wholesale e-commerce platform for Tattly.
Slack is a chat app on steroids. It has completely revolutionized how I communicate with my teams, cutting down on emails we are sending each other.
Basecamp keeps track of our custom projects at Tattly and allows conversations for our CreativeMornings hosts around the world.
Tinyletter is the simplest and most pleasant way to send small, personal newsletters. I use it for my co-working space.
Authenticjobs is where we post all of our job listings
Trello is keeping us on track with internal projects and bugs we need to fix.
1Password keeps me sane. Not sure what I would do without it. The team functionality is pure gold.
Flickr hosts all of our CreativeMornings photos.
Teuxdeux is how I keep track of my daily to-dos. (it’s my own app)
Simplenote is where I keep all of my notes, combined with Notational Velocity on the computer.
rdio is my music library in the cloud.
Feedly is where I keep all my bookmarks organized.
Netflix is what I use to watch shows.
What about you? Do you love and use certain services that we don’t know about? Share in a comment!
I don’t see anything about automatic backups in here Tina! Backblaze is $5/mo per computer, it’s a no-brainer to take care of having an off-site backup.
I also pay I think $1/mo(!) for ChronoMate which is a Freshbooks add on that basically does a few neat things, one big one for me is basically allowing desktop shortcuts to Freshbooks while it’s running, which is pretty handy.
Great list though, a lot of overlap with mine!
Jan 26th, 2015 / 9:57 am
I use Dropvox, which is a tool for recording audio and then storing it to your Dropbox instead of your device. I interview people often so I rely on this.
I also use an IFTTT recipe to store the Tweets I favourite to my Evernote notebook. Especially good if someone has links I want to go back to later.
Jan 26th, 2015 / 9:58 am
Girl, this is one good looking list.
Was wondering about off-site backups, I’ve been delaying too long and at this point am asking for a disaster. Will check out Backblaze.
Jan 26th, 2015 / 11:23 am
Great point about the backups, Jordan! I use Crashplan for that & its a huge weight off to not have to remember to do manual backups.
I couldn’t live without ActiveInbox for gmail… it allows you to flag emails as Action or Waiting on and assign a Due Date, so it turns your inbox into a daily to-do list. Love that I can determine when I need to respond or follow-up on an item & then remove it from my view without worrying about forgetting about it entirely!
Jan 26th, 2015 / 12:01 pm
TeanGantt for project management!
Jan 26th, 2015 / 12:37 pm
I use Google Drive/Apps for Work in addition to Dropbox.
I use Freedcamp instead of Basecamp to manage projects and keep checklists for my podcast.
I use WaveApps to keep track of expenses, and Harvest for invoicing/time tracking.
I also use 1Password to manage my passwords because, like Tina, I have a ton of logins for all these services and there is no human way to remember everything.
So my question, which I get asked all the time myself, is “how do you deal with fragmentation?” Do these apps talk to each other? Should they? Do you find yourself doing the same thing multiple times (ex. setting up a project in Basecamp, Dropbox, Freshbooks, Slack, etc. all before you can even get started)
Jan 26th, 2015 / 12:47 pm
I was delighted to see your smiling face in HelpScout’s testimonials: http://www.helpscout.net/
Jan 26th, 2015 / 1:45 pm
LOVE LOVE LOVE Basecamp!
As an in-house designer, it works great to organize all the different “clients” (departments and project managers we have).
project files, comments, calendar, and milestones all in one place!
Whenever we do a project outside of Basecamp, it often becomes disorganized.
Jan 26th, 2015 / 2:41 pm
Shopify : ecommerce – no one beat the speed of shopify displaying pages
Tictail : ecommerce – super ux admin and free (only 1$/month for custom domain)
1Password : super secure password generator and centralized.
Evernote : my virtual notepad, I also love the speed of national velocity and Simple note.
Unroll.me : to help me clean my inbox for free Vs paid Sanebox
Balsamiq : super easy and fast way to mockup anything
Spotify : all the music I want with great playlists
Cleanmymac : keep my Mac clean and fast
Daisydisk : quickly identify the biggest files on your hard drive and peripherals.
Tradeshift : super easy online invoicing
Stripe : to receive a lot of money easily
PayPal : same as above, they should hire a designer though.
Boom : to boost the audio volume and enhance quality of your music.
Jan 26th, 2015 / 6:08 pm
It is not that expensive to host your own server in a data centre. I do this for my friends and family. So that they have their own secure email. There is also some great open source Cloud software – ownCloud – I run that too, there is even a iOS app, so my friends and family can browse their stuff from their iPhones.
Well worth it, if a few friends chip in with the cost, it can be cheap and you have your own system – you do need to be pretty reasonable with FreeBSD or Linux but worth the effort in getting up to speed with the technology.
Jan 27th, 2015 / 3:42 am
THANK YOU!
Jan 27th, 2015 / 11:37 am
I second Teamgantt from the comment above. I plug Teamgantt and Paydirt (for time tracking) into my Basecamp. I technically also use Highrise, but not really!
I live by Teuxdeux! I also use Wunderlist, Evernote, and Google Docs for other lists and word processing. I’m surprised to see you use Simplenote, Tina! I’m not familiar with it.
Instead of 1Password, I have LastPass.
I used a blog post to respond with my full list (link is in my name). Thanks for the inspiration. :)
Jan 27th, 2015 / 2:17 pm
How wunderbar, Tina! Thank you so much!
Btw, I’m nothing without TeuxDeux:
specially now with a newborn! ^_^*
Jan 27th, 2015 / 3:44 pm
STREAM by TranslateMedia for secure translation workflow management, collaboration with other linguists, editing and proofreading and translation memory .
Jan 28th, 2015 / 4:22 am
The team here at Olark live chat uses:
– HipChat for inter-office comms
– Trello for project tracking
– LastPass for remembering and sharing logins
– Stripe for payments
– GitHub for repos, etc.
– RecruiterBox for new candidates
– Desk.com for ticket tracking + social responses
And of course we use Olark for customer service and support ;)
Jan 28th, 2015 / 4:57 pm
Two good ones I like to add to your list:
– Outright: like mint.com for business expenses. Automatically keeps track of business spending and easy to categorize. HUGE time save during tax time. Great for freelancers.
– Meldium: Keeps tracks of passwords within teams automatically. One click sign ins. Easy to grant and revoke access.
Jan 28th, 2015 / 5:17 pm
I have beef with one tiny thing.. Stocksy should be in place of shutterstock! Stocksy is an awesome new stock photography co-op, I highly recommend checking it out.
Jan 28th, 2015 / 6:34 pm
great list! I’d also recommend…
moneypenny.com – have them answer your phone, great if you’re not available and don’t want to miss clients or leads. UK and US
Jan 29th, 2015 / 10:15 am
Eztexting.com for sending, storing, and managing texting campaigns from the web!
Jan 30th, 2015 / 6:23 pm
Superb site you have here but I was curious if you knew
of any discussion boards hat cover the same topics talked about
here? I’d really live to be a part of online community where I
can get suggestions from other experienced people
that share the same interest. If yyou have
any suggestions, please let me know. Kudos!
Jan 31st, 2015 / 3:02 am
Of these I have used drop box only so far. Heard a lot about Mailchimp but yet to use them. There are quite a few interesting ones, especially the one for invoices caught my eye, going to try it.
Feb 1st, 2015 / 1:14 pm
Great list or a list a great jumpstart for a conversation about this topic!
My business is smaller and therefore requires fewer tools, but I also recommend tools for clients, so am often trying things out.
I live and die by Basecamp, MailChimp, and Evernote. I’ve been using 1Password for years and recommended it to many clients, but recently read that it isn’t actually secure, so I just purchased a Strip license and am experimenting with it.
For invoicing and time tracking I’ve been using HarvestApp for years and have no problems with it, but I’m always into checking out new ideas.
I love CrashPlan for backups – I’ve tried out nearly every service of this type, graduating from Mozy to Backblaze to CrashPlan and feel that the latter is the best so far.
Keeping up with news is a combination of Feedly, Twitter and Instapaper. Promulgating the interesting bits falls to IFTTT and Buffer. I love Buffer. I also use IFTTT to tie practically all of the aforementioned services together, both for myself and clients.
If there isn’t already a productivity community, we should start one.
Feb 2nd, 2015 / 9:44 pm
I forgot about Dropmark for bookmarking. I’ve used many services over the years for bookmarking. I started with Delicious, and moved to Pinboard when Delicious imploded, but found myself never using it. I gave Dropmark a tryout and have been using it for a long while now. It has a neat sharing feature for groups of bookmarks that I oftentimes use to share groups of websites with clients and others.
Also, there’s a neat free utility for OS X called Flycut that expands your clipboard, and like Dropmark, lives in your menubar. I use this zillions of times a day.
Feb 2nd, 2015 / 9:52 pm
Hey folks, sorry for the multiple postings (and the typos), but things keep occurring to me, and as far as I can tell, there’s no post edit function.
Echo Sign (part of Adobe these days) is a wonderful free service (for up to 10 electronic signatures. It integrates with Google Drive. I use it for contracts. And if a client asks for a W-9, EchoSign handily provides that in their library so you can send it along in a few clicks.
Oops, I just re-realized that this is a cloud service article, so please strike the mention of Flycut from the record!
Feb 2nd, 2015 / 10:03 pm
@Peter, it isn’t quite a community, but I’ve been producing a podcast and blog about such topics for a year already. Check out http://busycreator.com if you get a moment.
Would love your suggestions on what to include more of.
Feb 3rd, 2015 / 8:14 am
Evernote. For me, especially as a designer, I can’t imagine my life without it. It’s where I store all my inspiration, ideas and notes. I reference it constantly – for personal and professional use.
Feb 6th, 2015 / 8:35 am
Thanks for sharing – I enjoyed reading the comments and seeing what cloud services different people were using. You gave some great examples in your post as well.
Feb 23rd, 2015 / 2:13 pm