Not much software is needed to run the day-to-day operation of Blot.
We communicate amongst ourselves and with our customers using email. Email is decentralized and asynchronous. Chat applications are not. At the moment we use the Google Workspace to host our email but we intend to move elsewhere.
We use a text-file (todo.txt) to keep track of tasks. If somebody needs to be notified when a task is complete, we include a link to the appropriate email thread in the text file, along with a description of the task. This text-file is checked into version control which means we can easily summarize our completed tasks – the feed of work completed on Blot's news page is generated automatically from this file.
We use an Excel spreadsheet which we update once per month with revenue and costs. We use TurboTax to generate our tax documents. Ours costs are as follows, in approximate descending order:
We use Stripe and PayPal to process payments.