Lighthouse Studio is an 8-person creative agency in Brooklyn that launched in 2023. Founder Maya Patel made an unusual call early on: keep the entire SaaS bill below $300/month, even as the team grew from three people to eight. SaaSTweaks sat down with Maya to walk through the actual line items, the negotiation tactics that worked, and the tools she still refuses to buy.
How the budget rule got set
Q: Why $300/month, specifically?
A: It was not a magic number. When I left my previous agency to start Lighthouse, I did the math on what we were spending per head on tools — it was around $480/month per person. That felt absurd for what we actually used day-to-day. I cut it in half, rounded down, and made $300 the cap for the whole company until we hit ten people. Every dollar that did not go to software went into a salary line. That math defended itself at every renewal conversation.
Q: Did the team push back?
A: At first, yes. The two designers we hired in month four came from bigger studios and assumed we had Figma Organization, Adobe Creative Cloud All-Apps, the whole Frame.io stack. We did not. We had Figma Professional for the two seats that needed the dev-mode handoff and free Figma for everyone else. We had Adobe Photography plan, which is $20/month and covers Photoshop and Lightroom. The first two weeks were rough. By week six nobody mentioned it.
The actual stack, line by line
Q: Walk through the bill.
A: Here is the rough breakdown for the period we held closest to the cap:
- Google Workspace Business Starter — $6/user/month. Eight seats, $48/month. Email, Drive, Meet, Calendar. Replaces three separate tools.
- Figma Professional — two paid seats at $15 each, $30/month. The other six designers worked on viewer or free editor seats depending on the project.
- Adobe Photography — $20/month. One shared license, internal SOP for who has it open when.
- Notion — free Plus tier through their startup credit. Project management, client portals, internal wiki.
- Slack — free tier for the first year. We got by on the 90-day message history limit by archiving important threads to Notion every Friday.
- Calendly — $10/month, one seat that team-routed.
- HelloSign — $20/month, three signers.
- Loom — $15/month, three seats sharing.
- Stripe + Wave for invoicing — Stripe is processor fees only, Wave is free.
- Cloudflare Pages + R2 — under $5/month for our marketing site and asset CDN.
That comes in around $148 in fixed costs. The other ~$150 of headroom went to project-specific tools — a one-month Webflow seat for a client build, occasional ChatGPT Plus seats, Frame.io for a single video project. We treated those as project line items, billed through.
Q: No dedicated project management tool?
A: Notion did 80% of what Asana or ClickUp would have done. The 20% it did not do — Gantt views, time tracking, complex dependencies — we did not need. We are a creative shop running 4-6 projects at a time. A kanban board, a calendar, and a weekly Friday review meeting covers it. The day we hit twelve concurrent projects we will revisit. Until then the $50-80/month a real PM tool costs is a salary contribution.
Pattern worth borrowing: Maya kept the fixed monthly bill at ~$148 and treated everything else as a project line item, billed through to the client. This converts most SaaS spend from overhead into pass-through revenue.
Negotiation tactics that actually worked
Q: What discounts did you actually get?
A: Three that mattered. First, Notion Plus through their startup program — that was a 12-month credit worth around $1,000 for our seat count. Second, when we eventually upgraded Slack to a paid plan in year two, I emailed their sales team in November (their fiscal year-end) saying we were a small agency comparing them to Discord. Got 20% off year one and a guarantee of no price increase at renewal. Third, Adobe ran a Black Friday deal on Creative Cloud that we stacked with an education-adjacent discount one of our designers had retained.
Q: The year-end timing keeps coming up.
A: Every SaaS rep has a quarterly quota. The last six weeks of any quarter is when discounts get approved fastest. The last two weeks of any fiscal year is when discounts get approved that nobody thought were possible. I keep a calendar reminder on October 15 every year to negotiate Slack and any other annual renewal that lands in November-December. This year I am doing the same trick on a Notion Business upgrade.
Q: Did you ever walk away?
A: Twice. Frame.io renewal in year one — they would not match what we were quoted by a smaller competitor and we just used that smaller tool for two months. We came back to Frame later when a client required it, paid month-to-month, no annual commitment. The other was an HR tool that quoted us $400/month for an 8-person team. We were not buying it. We use a Notion template and a free payroll add-on through our accountant.
Tools she refused to buy
Q: What is on the no-buy list?
A: A few categories.
- Sales engagement tools. We do not do outbound. Our pipeline is referrals and inbound from one strong newsletter. Outreach.io would be a $1,500/month line item that solves a problem we do not have.
- Dedicated time-tracking SaaS. Toggl Free is enough for the two team members who track hours for hourly clients. Project work is fixed-bid, so most of the team does not track time at all.
- Customer-success platforms. We have eleven retainer clients. Eleven retainer clients means eleven Slack channels and a shared Notion page per client. A $400/month CS tool is a tool looking for a problem.
- Business intelligence tools. We have a Google Sheet that pulls from Stripe and Wave via Zapier free tier. I am the only person who looks at it. A Looker Studio dashboard would be cosmetic.
Q: Anything from the no-buy list that you eventually added?
A: ChatGPT Plus, finally. We held out for almost a year because the free tier was usable. The day we added Plus seats for the four senior designers was the day a client RFP came in that needed 14 ad concepts in 36 hours. We earned the annual subscription back in that one project.
Lessons for other small teams
Q: What would you tell a 5-person agency starting today?
A: Three things. First, write down the fixed monthly bill before you sign anything. Print it. Stick it next to your monitor. Watch it grow and ask whether the new line item replaces an old one or just adds. Second, never sign annual on month one. Pay monthly for at least 90 days, decide if the tool is sticky, then negotiate annual at the end of the trial period when you have leverage. Third, build a renewal calendar. Every annual contract gets a calendar reminder 45 days before renewal. That gives time for one good negotiation cycle.
Q: Biggest spending mistake you made anyway?
A: Buying Webflow Workspace before we had a paying Webflow client. I paid $19/month for four months for a tool nobody on the team was building anything in. Classic case of "we might need this." When we actually got a Webflow project, we upgraded for one month at the higher tier and then cancelled when the project shipped. That single mistake cost about $76 — small money in absolute terms but the principle is what mattered: do not buy capacity ahead of demand.
Q: What changes as you cross 10 people?
A: Honestly, very little. The cap relaxes a bit — probably to $500/month — but the rule stays. Every new tool replaces one or justifies itself with a measurable unit, like hours saved per week or revenue attributable. We still archive Slack to Notion on Fridays. We still negotiate every renewal. The discipline is the product as much as the work we ship.
Thanks to Maya for sharing the actual numbers. SaaSTweaks readers can follow Lighthouse Studio's ongoing work and Maya's posts on lean agency operations.