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The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

panelbear.com

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Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#3
post #2

This seems like a pretty big stack for a single person to administrate - how much time do you spend on doing operations vs development?

Right now the operational effort is pretty minimal to be honest. I spend most of my time developing new features and talking my customers.

I know it seems like a lot of tools, but most of them are set up once and forget. Except for the occasional round of dependency updates. But even for that I have automated dependency/container scanning to detect vulnerabilities, and get notified if updating an image is recommended.

Most of the stack consists of "platform" tools, such as the ingress-nginx, external-dns, or cert-manager. So it's stuff I take with me for every project. It's like a personal Heroku I've been building, but way cheaper and fully customizable.

I've been iterating on this stack over the years with various other projects, and also learned a lot from running Kubernetes in production at my full-time job, so it's not something I'd advise for someone who just wants to deploy their MVP for the first time.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#4
As a fairly new dev, this is really great information for me. Thanks for posting this.

If you don't mind me asking, roughly how much do you spend (time) on this every week? How much of that is split between development, operations and product or business development?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#5
post #3
post #2

This seems like a pretty big stack for a single person to administrate - how much time do you spend on doing operations vs development?

Right now the operational effort is pretty minimal to be honest. I spend most of my time developing new features and talking my customers. I know it seems like a lot of tools, but most of them are set up once and forget. Except for the occasional round of dependency updates. But even for that I have automated dependency/container scanning to detect vulnerabilities, and get notified if updating an image is recommended…

Replace Python/Django with Java/Kotlin/SpringBoot and you pretty much have my preferred project stack, which also organically grew due to being exposed to these platform tools in my day job.

Kubernetes/Terraform and friends are really useful as a solo-dev if, and only if you have the required experience with them.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#9
Very, very similar to the tech stack we have in my engineering teams (other than we use Flask and SQLAlchemy instead of Django). Really like it. I've not heard of ClickHouse before, but that looks interesting. (If I had a requirement around time series, I was thinking of checking out Timescale - https://www.timescale.com.)

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#10
At my startup we use a pretty similar tech stack, except we are on Heroku for infrastructure which makes our life a lot easier, and gives us things like review apps quite easily.

One piece we've struggled with is just mypy doesn't seem to play too nicely with Django. It definitely feels like a world of difference between the type support we get in our React app with Typescript and mypy with Django. Would be curious what OP's experience has been with that.

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