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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

#21

Post by amzans »

brudgers wrote: post #8

How long did it take you to learn enough about all those technologies? How much of it was on the job?

Most of my learning was on the job, and in building some open-source projects that I have released over the years, for example: - https://github.com/anthonynsimon/bild - https://github.com/traduora/traduora

I still have a lot to learn, but IMO nothing beats struggling with something for a long time, and pushing along until you're no longer terrible at it.

I feel that most of what I know I learned by starting projects on topics I initially new nothing about, and sticking to it.

Regarding on the job learning, I have been working with Python/Scala for my full-time job over the past 3.5 years, and that helped too. Specially in terms of running multi-regional services, and the challenges that come with that.

We run several applications on Kubernetes using AWS (combined >2k req/s at peak time), and that was a big challenge for me from which I learned a lot. Specially when you're on-call, and one faulty node brings down the entire cluster, that fails over to another region and repeat :)

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#22

Post by triangleman »

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…

Indeed OP uses this sort of stack in his full time job and has learned about all the kinks over the years, while getting paid to do it!

I'm working on a side project and it's literally a bunch of .py files in a folder. Libraries include fastapi and sqlite3. I cannot think of a reason to use container orchestration over a "single beefy machine" in almost any use case.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#25

Post by jrochkind1 »

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've been spending some time looking at moving to heroku, but having trouble figuring out how to use it for a real production for deploy for "only" a couple hundred dollars a month.

Is that what you're doing? "Standard" dynos and just a few of them are working for you, I assume, for that budget? In my tests, with a Rails app, "standard" dynos are looking surprisingly slow, possibly unacceptably so. Very curious to hear about other people's heroku formations if anyone wants to share. What platform you're on (Rails or something else), and what your response times look like, would also be interesting.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#28

Post by amzans »

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 features.

If I wanted to start a new project, I can leverage the same stack and be up and running in minutes. Which means I can take advantage of my cumulative efforts for any future project.

It's definitely not for everyone as you said, but it might be a good solution for many :)

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#29

Post by jrochkind1 »

amzans wrote: post #3
lnsp wrote: 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…

What would you advise for someone who doesn't have the pre-existing k8 expertise etc?

The ops environment still looks overwhelming to me, if there's a way to do it sustainably without a really heavy-weight ops infrastructure, I haven't figured it out. Like, something that to me requires like a full-time job just to do ops, although maybe not if you've spent some years learning the ops tools, but then same same.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#30

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

For the one man projects I'm thinking of starting there's a good chance I will make at best 100 a month for the first couple months, having probably only one customer for that time.
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