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Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

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Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#61

Post by mbzi »

langbot wrote: post #60

https://github.com/async-labs/saas "Build your own SaaS business with SaaS boilerplate. Productive stack: React, Material-UI, Next, MobX, WebSockets, Express, Node, Mongoose, MongoDB. Written with TypeScript"

I like this, I see what they're doing and it looks promising. However It lacks a data request/GDPR takedown section which for me makes the project commercially useless.

Most teams/products always look at compliance as the last big rock to implement and it becomes a massive headache. If this project is focused to B2B learning it should have been tackled first (and not missing from the demo).

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#62

Post by ozim »

eloff wrote: post #15
sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote: post #9

What is the problem just build it your self. A simple template that has a login with a todo list can be extended to have a companies table. When you have added this, you can add a n to n relation between companies and users and poof you have a B2B saas app template.

Having built a number of these, it's not that simple. For example do you put a tenant column on every table, have a separate table per tenant, or have a separate schema or database? There are tradeoffs for each approach and lots of gotchas you wouldn't expect. Like if you use a separate table or database, migrations take forever, you can run into file descriptor limits in your database, etc.

This leads to answer, which is: just start building, whatever option you will choose you will run into gotchas.

So no point of overthinking it.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#63

Post by yread »

mbzi wrote: post #61
langbot wrote: post #60

https://github.com/async-labs/saas "Build your own SaaS business with SaaS boilerplate. Productive stack: React, Material-UI, Next, MobX, WebSockets, Express, Node, Mongoose, MongoDB. Written with TypeScript"

I like this, I see what they're doing and it looks promising. However It lacks a data request/GDPR takedown section which for me makes the project commercially useless. Most teams/products always look at compliance as the last big rock to implement and it becomes a massive headache. If this project is focused to B2B learning it should have been tackled first (and not missing from the demo).

Is it really such a big problem in b2b? Can't you be only the Processor sign a DPA with your customers and let them handle the biggest part of the headache?

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#64

Post by hackerm0nkey »

I have built many over the years in Java but nothing is public, I was thinking of abstracting away a Microservice template as a starting point for my projects.

What you are mentioning is a very specific example of that, happy to have a chat and perhaps we can build that together and open source it ?

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#65

Post by hackerm0nkey »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #54
thrownaway954 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using an ORM it's very simple. once you setup the relationships between models, you always use the highest level model as the entry point of your query and the ORM will scope the query for you. ie in Rails, if your highest level model is Account you just always use @account.customer.find(18). the Rails ORM will automatically scope the query to the current account. using multiple schemas becomes a nightmare when you w…

The highest level entry point makes so much sense. I’ve been building multitenant saas for last 3 years enforcing “where tenant = x” and you’ve just blown my mind.

On more than one occasion I've started with a simple table for all tenants (where tenant = x) because we didn't know at the time if we will have many.

Then progressively when we understood how the service will be used, refactored to keep separate tenant's data separate.

Ended up with each tenant in a given schema, we were using Java and relied on Hibernate (ORM) to help connecting to the correct DB (it does support multi-tenancy) as well as on a DB migration tool (Liquibase) so any changes we made to the schema get replicated over all tenants.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#66

Post by hackerm0nkey »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #51
ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

using an ORM it's very simple. once you setup the relationships between models, you always use the highest level model as the entry point of your query and the ORM will scope the query for you. ie in Rails, if your highest level model is Account you just always use @account.customer.find(18). the Rails ORM will automatically scope the query to the current account. using multiple schemas becomes a nightmare when you w…

I come more from a JVM world. But aren't there any DB migration/refactoring tools in Rails to allow for changes to propagate across tenants ?

E.g for the JVM, there's Liquibase and Flyway, and I agree with you, setting that up took a good part of a couple of weeks of dedicated effort.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#67

Post by mguerville »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

Thanks for this clear explanation. I’m a non developer currently experimenting with no code apps, I’m using userid filtering to segregate data between users and it feels “wrong” but it’s reassuring to see that it’s a pretty normal starting point before having a more mature architecture

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#68

Post by hackerm0nkey »

mbzi wrote: post #61
langbot wrote: post #60

https://github.com/async-labs/saas "Build your own SaaS business with SaaS boilerplate. Productive stack: React, Material-UI, Next, MobX, WebSockets, Express, Node, Mongoose, MongoDB. Written with TypeScript"

I like this, I see what they're doing and it looks promising. However It lacks a data request/GDPR takedown section which for me makes the project commercially useless. Most teams/products always look at compliance as the last big rock to implement and it becomes a massive headache. If this project is focused to B2B learning it should have been tackled first (and not missing from the demo).

It's a template, GDPR is EU-specific and not everyone in the world has to worry about that, it's just too specific a subject to consider in a generic template.

If an EU-based (or storing EU data) team need to jump start from this, one can implement that section on top and not have to wait until the end as you say. The aim of the template is to give you a head start in the right direction.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#69

Post by hackerm0nkey »

masonhensley wrote: post #24

I know it's a little early and it will be in Ruby on Rails. However, I'm working on open sourcing a clone of Stripe's Home [1] as part of a series of open source B2B applications & they should check all those boxes (besides the Java/Node) I'm also happy to walk you (or others in the thread if time permits) though the source code of a closed source app I have over a video call if you need to grok the mechanics/db stru…

Interested to see how you guys approached that for a Java B2B service. Thanks for the offer.
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