You are either oblivious to the facts or don’t care or have the money to splash if you haven’t yet noticed how much startups costs have increased in the past one year, especially if you are a tech startup in Africa paying for certain services in USD.
The one resource that has increased costs for a lot of startups is cloud hosting/compute instances, whether you have been using AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud to mention a few, you have definitely seen a rise in your expenses, not because you are doing something wrong, but simply because the value of your country’s currency is on a downward spiral.
This has been so for the Naira in Nigeria and the Kenya Shilling. Startups in these countries have seen a rise in their spending simply because their local currencies are spiraling downwards against the dollar.
Other costs that have gone up include advertising spend on social media platforms, spend on collaboration platforms such as Slack, Trello, Asana, corporate and transactional email providers such as Sendgrid, Brevo among others.
Generally, if a startup has been using a service based outside their country and is paid for in dollars, pounds or Euros then have definitely been feeling the heat over the past few months.
To reduce our spend on cloud costs we opted for Gcore which is really affordable for smaller projects and Linode for some of the bigger projects.
For other services offered on G-suite and Slack such as emails, meetings, collaboration/project management as well as invoicing, books, CRM and other day to day software needed for business management, we moved to Zoho.
We have used Zoho email for over 7 years now and it has been really great. It is easy to set up and can be integrated with a host of other tools/platforms for easy accessibility. Just recently we started paying for their other services such as meetings and so far so good.
The best part is that Zoho charges in the local currency (KES) and is very affordable.
For transactional emails, we also moved from Sendgrid to Zeptomail by Zoho. It is just as efficient and better yet way more affordable in these tough economic times. Transactional emails are emails users receive when a certain action is taken on your platforms, say password recovery, new sign up email, login email among others.
Depending on your business, you can be sending out a lot of emails thus Zeptomail can be a good alternative to help you remain efficient while still keep costs in check.
For website hosting we started exploring local solutions such as Lenasi, Building Afrika is hosted on Lenasi (now under HostAfrica). Their web hosting solution has so far held its own and proven to be a great option so we are looking to test out their server/cloud solutions as well, specifically Linux virtual machines.
Another great local alternative for cloud hosting that we are exploring is HostPinnacle.
It is time to try local solutions to our startup problems.
