Ask HN: What are your biggest time savers when building a SaaS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your biggest time savers when building a SaaS?

30 pointsphiltar9 comments

What are some things you do when building a SaaS that save a ton of time?

Some that I can name:

* Use a web framework

* Customize a template instead of building from scratch (wrap bootstrap)

* outsource your billing (zuroa, chargify, etc.)

What are some tricks you can use to go from idea to product in two weeks?

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- Outsource authentication. Use Okta, Auth0, or the likes. Especially cheap for Enterprise SaaS apps where there will not be a lot of users.

- Use a first-party, well-known framework for the frontend. create-react-app, vue-cli, etc. They work well and have supported upgrade paths

- Setup a CI/CD pipeline and testing site early. This may be an upfront investment, but it will allow you to quickly iterate, have something to demonstrate, and easily launch your prod site when you're ready

- Other things I personally like are UI Framework for the frontend, ORM with migration support for the Backend, and Swagger with automatic client library generation. There's arguments for and against each of these but they help me devolop faster

I agree writing login, forgot password, two-factor auth, change password is a huge time suck. My fear of using a 3rd party such as Auth0 for such a critical part of your application is vendor dependency. I've been bitten badly by 3rd party companies shutting down, being acquired, or abandoned.

I hate to advocate for it, but AWS Cognito is laughably cheap and certainly not going anywhere. Big downside is that there isn't a way to export; you'd have to list all usernames and have every user reset their password. Not really helping with vendor dependency, unfortunately.

It takes a lot of sorting through terrible docs to understand, but user pools are OpenID Connect compliant. You get canned login/mfa/forgot ui's out of the box for every platform, and it's so cheap.

50k MAU with Cognito: free. [1]

50k MAU with Auth0: $850/mo. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/

[2] https://auth0.com/pricing

EDIT: Thinking about this post a bit, it doesn't really address your key concern of vendor lock-in and feels like a shill. My immediate gut reaction was "who cares if you're locked in, no way can you beat the price," and that isn't very constructive. I know on an intellectual level that history has taught us a lot of things about monopolies and entrenched players, but emotionally the visible price tag elicits a strong response. Maybe someday Teddy Roosevelt will rise from his grave and save us all.

* Use an OPINIONATED framework.

* Generate your pages server side. client side frameworks add a ton of complexity for no benefit.

* Deploy to Heroku.

* Outsource your development if you can afford to.

* Concentrate on your landing page and blog. This is how customers will find you.

* Write system tests. chrome driver or whatever your framework supports.

I know a lot of people on HN say server rendered first, but imo the difference in speed and complexity is minimal if you already know Vue/react/angular.

Really the biggest benefit of server rendered is keeping everything as a monolith but if you have to support mobile then you need to expose an API anyways

Pre-rendering techniques on all SPA is poor and will introduce a lot of complexity.

don't be afraid to tell the client no you can't support something.

Use the stack you are most proficient in, unless you are building a SaaS in order to teach yourself a new language/framework.

vue is really a time saver for me. if I need to write an internal tool, I'd even use a vue based ui framework, like https://www.iviewui.com/

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