Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 94 posts

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

#13

Post by JoeSloth »

x3haloed wrote: post #10
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.

I think the request is more for guidance about how to do it right.

I’ve been trying to find some guidance too, specifically for authentication with B2B and how to be adaptable to work with different IAM/SSO platforms

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

#14

Post by benologist »

I have been working on this:

https://github.com/userdashboard/dashboard

Dashboard powers the basic 'web app with registrations' and then using modules it can be supplemented with organizations, Stripe Subscriptions and Stripe Connect to standardize / reuse the "SaaS boilerplate". It runs parallel to your application server so you can use whatever stack you like. Users browse your Dashboard server URL and it proxies your application server for content.

The software is complete but it needs niceties like useful charts and information added to the UI and I'll be prioritizing that in the coming weeks. It's got a really nice documentation site being generated with Github Actions but it's not publishing correctly unfortunately, probably tomorrow that will be resolved.

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

#15

Post by eloff »

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.

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

#18

Post by schappim »

excid3 wrote: post #11

I've been working on something like this for Ruby on Rails in case anyone is interested. It has multitenancy, billing separate for each tenant, automatic query filtering for the current tenant, etc. https://jumpstartrails.com

I 2nd https://jumpstartrails.com . I purchased the "Unlimited Site License", and it is well worth it.

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

#19

Post by ComputerGuru »

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. The actual code is shared (i.e. not installed separately or in separate processes) and you would simply use your dependency injection or equivalent to resolve the DB connection contingent on $user’s validated claims.

“Networking” or sharing entities across tenants becomes harder this way.. but purer/cleaner. You essentially create a federation layer and communicate across instances via a hard code wall (via network requests to yourself and an API) rather than “in memory” which is less efficient and requires a lot of boiler plate, but it’s going to be what you’re going to end up doing anyway.

Post reply on HN