Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#71

Post by XCSme » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

The tools most useful for me as a solo founder:

* https://paddle.com - Paddle (payments) - selling internationally without having to deal with all the local taxes

* https://uxwizz.com - UXWizz (analytics) - built my own private, self-hosted analytics platform that provides everything I need (stats, event tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, a/b tests, etc.) in a single platform that doesn't cost thousands per month

* Gmail - Like it or not, I got used to using gmail to handle customer support requests (I use the auto-labeling features to keep them categorized) and the SMTP forwarding to send/receive emails using my own domain names. I am thinking of moving away (for privacy reasons mostly), but it works really well at the moment.

* DigitalOcean/Contabo for VPSs for self-hosting everything that I need

This is mostly it, I try to stay as lean as possible. Self-hosting is pretty easy nowadays and it rarely needs maintenance, so I usually prefer it because of the control over the product/data and the cost reduction that it gives.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#72

Post by XCSme » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

worker767424 wrote: post #57

I recently stumbled across healthchecks.io. It's a one-man SaaS that does cronjob monitoring.

Oh yeah, that's good, I use it to monitor a database backup cron.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#73

Post by BadCookie » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

krisgenre wrote: post #23

How about privacy and terms pages? does one need a lawyer or is there a SaaS service to generate one?

Shopify has these for free, but the wording (not surprisingly) is aimed at an e-commerce use case, so may not fit what you need exactly.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#74

Post by tibanne » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

dtech wrote: post #68

stephenhuey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your business is not nefarious spamming and deliverability is important to your use case, then I highly recommend the helpful folks at Postmark over all others. Transactional email delivery can be a minefield not for the faint of heart. Seems easy at first….

+1'ing this, it's a narrowly scoped API but it works extremely well.

Second this. Postmark is amazing.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#75

Post by DataCrayon » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

For PlotAPI (https://plotapi.com) I’m using:

- FastAPI for the SaaS itself

- WooCommerce for the accounts and subscriptions

- Nikola for the gallery and feature demonstrations

- FreeAgent for handling all the tax obligations (UK)

I’ve been checking out Ghost CMS recently. It’s looking great so far for content and subscription management.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#76

Post by exolymph » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

> I want to mostly focus on development and skip the marketing, pr and other related stuff

You're most likely doomed tbh. Talking to customers is essential.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#77

Post by pid-1 » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

ianberdin wrote: post #17

I do this things for 10 years. Right from the start of commercial development. I suggest to read SEO books and use this as a main source of customers as I do. You will get what you want: better focus on the product. - Crisp (best website chat, email campaigns). - Namecheap. - Cloudflare (speedup website loading around the world). - Postmark (transactional emails). - Uploadcare (come on, save days on image uploading/c…

I am thinking about creating my own SaaS. Do you happen to have an invite?

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#78

Post by cultofmetatron » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 11:02 PM UTC

0des wrote: post #69

cultofmetatron wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Donglegate, I had already put them on my blacklist. Now I see that my suspicions that it was just the tip of the iceberg came out to be true.

> “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.” > “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome…

Thats the kind of lack of self awareness and disregard for other's you'd expect to hear out of a sociopath

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#79

Post by marc_io » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

aradox66 wrote: post #40

ericb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting list. Would you be willing to add in edits on what you use each one for? For example, Zapier "moves things between web apps." Is that an ETL as a service? What is it E'ing, T'ing and L'ing, though?

Zapier is useful for integrating common tools (slack, drive, asana, etc etc) but would not be a good choice for most nontrivial ETL, or nontrivial any kind of integration. Eg, you want a slack notification when a Google form is filled out. Pretty painless to set up a zap. You want to keep a database table up to date with a Google sheet. You can do it on zapier, but it's gonna be a pain.

Integromat is cheaper and better than Zapier, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?

#80

Post by nojito » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #58

systemvoltage wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection. Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.

Better yet, keep it on Lightsail, it has fixed pricing plans for containers ($7 per mo), VPS ($3.5), database ($15), blob store ($3 per 100GB), and disk ($1 per 10GB). Lightsail can peer into (same region) regular VPC as well for $1 per 100GB ingress+egress.

That’s ridiculously expensive.