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The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

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Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#141

Post by dbmikus »

deckard1 wrote: post #123
slow_donkey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what 'containerize' means in this context, but adding a Dockerfile, building the image and changing your box to use docker should definitely not reduce velocity or increase deploy time to half an hour...

it's never that simple. With docker you have to worry about how containers talk to each other. Which at a bare minimum means exposing ports and adding a network layer. Suddenly you find yourself in the weeds with docker-compose and debating whether or not it's actually suitable for a production environment, when they recommend using swarm instead. Then you find out swarm is on shaky ground and now you're hearing abou…

If it's a monolith you don't have to worry about composing multiple containers. I've put a monolith in Docker so I could plop it on Google Cloud Run.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#142

Post by nullsense »

amzans wrote: post #28
eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

I agree with you. I wouldn't blindly recommend my stack to everyone, one could argue it's probably even overkill for my SaaS project right now. At this scale I could get away with a couple of $20/mo instances, and call it a day. However, it just made sense for me due to the simplified operations, and re-using most of the learnings from my full-time job. It has enabled me to move faster in shipping customer-facing fea…

I think the key thing is that you already know the stack and didn't have to learn it. I wouldn't recommend it to someone for whom the learning curve will be brutally steep, but if you already know it I'm sure it's pretty game changing in terms of scale you could handle just being a solo dev.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#143

Post by amzans »

dobg24 wrote: post #96

PM for DO Kubernetes here. My views are biased. This is an insightful article. A learning for me was how the author managed to switch multiple cloud providers even while being a one man SAAS. Kubernetes is overwhelming because of 2 things: Overload of terminology, and Distributed systems day 2 operations. Author succeeds so well because he has a starter stack (install, CI pipeline, secure, monitor, scale) maintained…

Thanks for the response! To clarify, I still a happy customer of DO, and would still use it for some other projects.

I have also had a fair share of issues with AWS services in the past (Athena, they took care of it a few months later), and GCP too. And I understand that no product is ever perfect.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#144

Post by xu3u32 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #43

Here's my self-serving advice for every one-man SaaS: Use Heroku. It's super easy to get started. And when you reach $2000+ in monthly bills, hire me to move things over onto dedicated or EC2 so that you'll get 10x that performance for the same price. As for the actual language, I think PostgreSQL + Ruby Backend + JS Frontend is still the easiest way to get started. All those great architectural ideas don't matter mu…

How hard is CORS set up with dedicated frontend/backend? I'm running into this with Django REST and VueJS. Or do you just host both using Heroku?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#145

Post by nickthemagicman »

nrmitchi wrote: post #82
tebbers wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you experience the downtime issues with DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes that the author also experienced? I'm also considering DOKS so would be great to know!

Note: source for this information is from discussions with DO via support and the kubernetes slack. I am not affiliated with DO in any way. The downtime issues with DOKS are directly related to the resources allocated to the control plane, which is not set up in a HA capacity. The resources assigned are directly related to the size/number of nodes you use. API-heavy applications can very easy knock out the control pl…

What do you mean API heavy? Do you mean hitting the kubernetes API?

Does k8s auto scaling count?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#146

Post by nickthemagicman »

bdcravens wrote: post #108
eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

If Docker is advantageous, then ECS is great alternative to Kubernetes. It gives you most of the benefits in a fully managed offering.

Didn't they recently integrate with docker compose? It looked really cool but I haven't tinkered with it yet.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#147

Post by amzans »

Wirerack wrote: post #99
smu wrote: post #55

Seems like there are a couple of tech stack posts on HN lately and I certainly enjoy reading them. But as a techie, the magic to me no longer lies in the product building, but in the ‘finding the first 10-100’ customers part. Have there been any posts on that lately?

I'd definitely appreciate seeing something like that too. After a couple of "build it first" failures I've come to see the wisdom in finding your customers and validating your idea first. I've read several of these SaaS walkthroughs and it invariably seems to follow this pattern: 1. Author has a blog with a large following on some topic. 2. Finds niche in that topic. 3. Makes a product and pushes it via their blog. 4…

Going from 0 paying customers to 1 is really difficult. Specially if you're asking for a recurring subscription.

Getting noticed is one of the hardest parts. Just having a great product is no longer enough.

For every Basecamp, there are probably tens, or even hundreds of similar competitors.

Can I name a few? Maybe.

What about the top 10? Probably not, and that's exactly the problem.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#148

Post by rebataur »

For early stage startups we just released fsKube: Your full-stack kubernetes enabler

fsKube provides as Desktop Web UI to setup entire AWS EKS Kubernetes cluster, with all the components and Django framework template with a full DevSecOps enabled, along with monitoring and operations.

The whole thing within 45 minutes. Support for Spot Instances, Graviton Processor and AMD AMI coming soon, will reduce already cheap EKS prices further.

Watch the full demo here https://youtu.be/Nt5yowdwm5Q

Product https://rebataur.com/tools/fskube

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#149

Post by csomar »

joshmn wrote: post #54

Serial one-man SaaS builder here with a pair of soft-landings and one big hit: I would agree with others who have opined that this is overkill. You couldn't pay me to use Terraform or Kubernetes for my SaaS unless it was a much larger team. My stack usually consists of this: A framework I am comfortable with that removes a lot of boilerplate (happens to be the one I know best in the language I know best), the databas…

I agree about Kubernetes but not about Terraform. Terraform is easy to understand, and it's basically just declarative configuration. You have some Cloudflare records for your domain? You can put them in a file, wiki or declare them in Terraform. So maybe just use Terraform and get the benefit of free deployment?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#150

Post by bdcravens »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #146
bdcravens wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Docker is advantageous, then ECS is great alternative to Kubernetes. It gives you most of the benefits in a fully managed offering.

Didn't they recently integrate with docker compose? It looked really cool but I haven't tinkered with it yet.

Yes.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/context/ecs-integration/

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