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The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

panelbear.com

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191–200 of 259 posts

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#191

Post by nawgz »

b20000 wrote: post #190

Wow, there is a like a million tools in use here. Before I clicked the link I was expecting the tool set to be extremely minimal and focused, e.g. HTML+CSS+javascript/node.js. I currently have a bunch of projects using PHP+javascript+HTML+CSS and I am seriously considering dropping PHP and focusing more on javascript, and thus using node.js instead of PHP, so I no longer have to keep up to date with PHP. Anyway, grea…

All JS is the place to be. TypeScript is an amazing dev experience, NodeJS is decently performant, and then it's all portable as hell thanks to the web.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#192

Post by amzans »

raphaelj wrote: post #182
amzans wrote: post #139

First of all, thank you all! Just the discussion on this post alone, is a goldmine for anyone trying to figure out what worked, and what not for others. This is why I love HN. To clarify a point about my article, I think everyone should do what works for them. Just because my unconventional stack for a solo founder works great for me, doesn't mean it will do the same for you. Your mileage may vary, and it all comes d…

Hey Anthony, I really like your product. It's crazy fast, might solve one of my issue, is super simple to use, and the UI is gorgeous. I've a few questions though: - how do you compare to other privacy focused analytics tools, such as https://usefathom.com/ or https://simpleanalytics.com/ ? - it seems like you just launched your SaaS a couple of weeks ago. Why didn't you launch it earlier by removing some not strictl…

Hey thanks for the nice comment :)

About your questions:

1) Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Plausible are great. They have done an incredible work too. Panelbear has already most (if not all) of the features you might find in their offerings. However, I do intend to dive into more advanced functionality, while keeping it simple to use. I will be talking more about it when I feel confident about what I can deliver.

2) I launched in September, but only with a few posts here and here. It was also a lot more barebones back then. I try to release a new feature each week, and traffic has been slowly ramping up. I guess I just haven't had much time to promote it, but I plan to keep writing blog posts if there's something interesting.

3) I try to limit work on Panelbear to 2 hours per day. If I want to be in this for the long-term, it's gotta be sustainable, and fun. I try to leverage most of the tools I already know, even if unconventional like Kubernetes, to help me focus on shipping rather than learning a new tool.

Glad you like the design :) I took courses in design when I was studying, but I actually struggle a lot with it. It has helped me appreciate just how much work goes into a good design.

Thanks!

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#193

Post by cbdumas »

xu3u32 wrote: post #144
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?

I'm not the person you asked but I have my frontend hosted separately from the Heroku backend. CORS was a bit of a pain at first, mostly because I had never had to deal with it before, but after initial setup I never think about it.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#194

Post by amzans »

jaggederest wrote: post #155
amzans wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku is a great product if you want development speed right from the start. I have used them in the past, and it was a very nice experience overall. For many projects this is more than enough. However, in my case I would be paying 2-3x more if I was using Heroku. With Kubernetes, in case I wanted to deploy new projects or even spin up a "testing" env, I can use the same stack/cluster, and not have my costs increase…

I just wonder how much you're spending per month. Going from $200 to $600 in exchange for not having so many moving parts would be 1000% worth it to me. Usually the margin on SaaS businesses is in the 60% range, most of which isn't infrastructure, so it's a rounding error until you get to the size where you have full time people working on infra.

In my case it's more that learning Heroku would take me longer than using what I already know well, Kubernetes on AWS.

So it wouldn't make sense for me to use Heroku (a tool I don't have much experience with), and pay more.

In terms of use of my time, to be honest I currently spend way more time sending emails, updating docs, and on "marketing" than on devops :)

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#195

Post by amzans »

Wheaties466 wrote: post #19
amzans wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

any chance you could expand on this? "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."

Regarding docker images, I use the image scanning feature of ECR: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-ecr-native-co...

The docs make it look really complicated, but it comes down to enabling the service on the Terraform config.

Also for app dependencies, I use bots to open PRs on my repo whenever an important security fix is published for one of my dependencies.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#196

Post by jacquesm »

amzans wrote: post #176
xyst wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Anthony - do you have any concerns with your current employer (Stylights) trying to make an IP claim on your one man saas company?

They have been very supportive, and signed legally binding documents to allow me to work on this. We're also hiring :)

That's one employer that I would not mind recommending.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#197

Post by amzans »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #138
amzans wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is more complex than what I'm looking at right now, but I still appreciate the read as it helps me think about some things I can do now to be better prepared for a more scalable environment later. Thanks. Oh, and I had one (serious, but off topic) question... what are you using to brew your fresh cup of coffee?

I like my coffee dripped, preferably from my home country (Costa Rica).

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#198

Post by bpicolo »

aerovistae wrote: post #160
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…

Okay, this thread is making me nervous about Heroku. I'm building a web app that runs on it and I clearly have not given the pricing scaling as much thought as I apparently need to. My site is a firebase powered SPA, so the only thing Heroku has to handle is the initial pageload....I would think that the standard 1x dyno would be sufficient for that....which is not very expensive...

If it's just a static site, use Netlify.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#199

Post by blackrock »

herodoturtle wrote: post #164
zomgwat wrote: post #46

As a one-man team operating a 10+ year old SaaS product, I’ve done two things that have helped keep things sustainable. The frontend continues to be server generated. PJAX style partial page updates is (mostly) dynamic enough. The maintenance burden of operating a JavaScript frontend is too high to justify for a 1-2 person team. The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applicati…

I'm glad you shared this. I've been reading the comments here with much interest but simultaneously also a sense of impostor syndrome, for I've been running my one-man SaaS on generic LAMP since 2005, and aside from adopting jQuery early on, I haven't much touched any other piece of exciting tech that's come out since. My old and boring stack works just fine on the VMs that it runs on, and and continues to support me…

Nice work. Your SaaS has been providing you income for 15 years.

Tell us about your SaaS. What were your challenges early on? What were your hardships? And what were your lessons learned? What would you do differently?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#200

Post by OJFord »

manigandham wrote: post #187
mvanga wrote: post #20

Honestly, having gone down this path a year back, just use Heroku for your backend. Maybe Netlify if you want to separate your frontend and backend. The amount of complexity and interdependencies these "here's my stack" posts describe are always a huge cognitive overhead for running a one-person SaaS. Heroku costs more, but there's a reason for it. If you're even remotely making money from your product, and are alone…

I recommend just writing a Docker container instead. That's the ultimately portability and you can run in much more efficient environments (Cloud Run, Fargate, DigitalOcean Apps, Fly.io) and still scale up to large Kubernetes-based clusters if/when you need it. Docker containers avoid the lock-in of a particular platform or CLI, and they can also be used as cheap CI/CD with multi-stage builds within the container.

And also Heroku. I'm not disagreeing, just saying Heroku becomes 'just another platform', and if it still looks expensive, you can go elsewhere, if it's cheaper/better in some way (I have no idea nor horses) then go with it.
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