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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

#41

Post by deforciant »

I use similar stack too :)

- GKE kubernetes - Managed Postgres (CloudSQL) - GCS buckets for file storage - Cloudflare for DNS - Countour for ingress - Keel for automating deployment updates - Mailgun - Sentry (errors) - Node-RED various little automations such as healthchecks

Planning to introduce Elasticsearch too, so far I have been testing the operator and it seems to be pretty good quality.

From maintenance perspective GKE is great, as long as the bills are paid, no need to login there pretty much ever. As a one man company this means a lot, I try to never spend any time on ops.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#42

Post by dyeje »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #25
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 he…

Checkout Hatchbox.io, just started using it myself. You basically pay a flat monthly rate for their Heroku-esque management service and then pay for the servers on your provider of choice separately (e.g. DO, AWS, etc).

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#43

Post by fxtentacle »

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 much until you have your first $5k monthly in reliable revenue. And by then, you'll have a completely different perspective than what you think you need now.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#45

Post by ThePhysicist »

Seems it's another cookie-less, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. This time from Germany!

It's pretty cool that there's so much going on in this space, but is it really wise going into the market with seemingly the exact same features that Plausible, Simple Analytics, Fathom, etc. offer? Even Cloudflare recently entered the privacy-friendly analytics market with a free product, so it seems that market is getting really crowded. Then again, every (commercial) website probably needs such a solution, so maybe the market is big enough.

I wonder though if these cookie-less solutions can give people the insights they need? You can do only very simple overall statistics and funnel analyses with this approach. Maybe that's enough for most websites though?

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#46

Post by zomgwat »

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 applications. That’s especially true if provisioning and configuration is mostly automated. A product like Google Cloud Run looks interesting for a few low-volume backend services that I operate. Containers are a good fit there because it simplifies operations rather than increases complexity. The core infrastructure will remain VMs for the foreseeable future.

I began doing Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) development in 2006. Ruby had been around for awhile but the growing popularity of RoR was driving a lot of changes in the ecosystem in those years. It was a fun time but I was working for a large company that allowed me the time to keep up with everything. I see today’s frontend and container ecosystems in the light of that experience. I’m now more content to wait it out and let the dust settle as much as I enjoy learning new technology.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#47

Post by amzans »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #45

Seems it's another cookie-less, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. This time from Germany! It's pretty cool that there's so much going on in this space, but is it really wise going into the market with seemingly the exact same features that Plausible, Simple Analytics, Fathom, etc. offer? Even Cloudflare recently entered the privacy-friendly analytics market with a free product, so it seems that market is…

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, I understand I'm entering a crowded market, but Panelbear is still in the early stages, and I'm trying to understand what problems my customers have that I could solve / how much value can I bring to them.

A crowded market also means more options for you as a customer. Specially when it comes to privacy-friendly tools, not only analytics, I'd argue that there's not enough options yet.

I initially built it for myself, as I was not fully satisfied with the existing solutions. And I do intend to offer more features than what you currently see, but unfortunately my time is limited and it's going to take a while to bring Panelbear to the feature-level I'd like it to be :)

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#48

Post by avan1 »

Glad to see that stack works for author, but honestly one man show's shouldn't be multi lingual stacks at all IMO. for me php (laravel for back and front with blade templates) or js (express and vuejs for frontend) and docker-compose for deploying and developing stuff is fast and enough stack.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#49

Post by golergka »

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 tried using AWS, Digital Ocean and other hosting platforms for my hobby projects, but every time I keep running into different problems and eventually give up and go back to Heroku - and things just work.

I would never recommend Heroku for my employer or for any company that has real production loads and a budget for administrators that know how to set it all up: Heroku does seem to get prohibitively expensive at larger scale. But for hobby projects that get couple of hundred requests per day this is more than enough, and if one of them gets too successfull, I'll just pay someone for a day or two of work for migrating my code to other hosted platform - and since I never use vendor-specific tech, this shouldn't be too hard to do.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#50

Post by ezekg »

Fellow solo founder here. I feel like this is pretty overkill, most notably k8s (and terraform.) The last company I worked at used k8s and it felt overkill even for them. But if it works for you, great, but I definitely think that'd require spending too much of my time on devops. Maybe I should do a "counter" blog post on using Rails, Heroku, Redis and Postgres. :)
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