Ask HN: What is the modern stack of SaaS products for a SaaS company?

I used to work with a lot of SaaS companies at my previous consulting company, these are the most common tools I saw:

- Sales: Salesforce, Gong.io, Intercom, Outreach, Highspot

- Product Development: Github, Jira, Pendo or Heap, Sketch, InVision

- HR: BambooHR, Lever

- Other: G Suite, Slack

That being said, this is what's the most common, not what's the best that's available. There's plenty of other SaaS products that might be better for your company and use cases!

That's kinda like asking "what is the modern car for executives?"

It really depends on what you're making and what you're familiar and productive with.

I still use jQuery along with Bootstrap and PouchDB on the client side and the Apache web server and CouchDB on the server side.

Start with a "boring technology" [0], something that has been around for a long time and is likely to remain around for a long time. You don't want to waste too much time fighting with the new and shiny tech because building and running SaaS is so much more than just writing code. The reason I'm bringing this up is because the technology choices that you will make, will inform a fair amount of tooling-related decisions down the road.

I started working on Hexadecimal [1] earlier this year, and chose Rails, Postgres, and Redis for the job. It allowed me to get up and running quickly without wasting my brain cycles on wrestling with the unproven tech. Another benefit of using a boring technology is that there are lots of written and spoken material (e.g., blog posts, Q/A, conference talks) accumulated over time, so there is a high probability that someone already had a problem that you might encounter.

> What are the common tools needed to start a SaaS company?

That will depend on many factors: how big is your team, how much money and time you are willing to spend on particular problems, etc.. I'd say if you are a solo developer (or a small team), try to use managed services as much as possible but keep a sharp eye on your monthly costs. If you are on a shoestring budget (think bootstrapping), those $19 / mo subscriptions here and there can add up very quickly.

I do share my costs (and tools) that I use to run Hexadecimal publicly [2]. That should give you a vague idea about what tools it takes to run a bootstrapped, one-person SaaS. There are similar pages on the Internets that delve into that topic [3][4]

[0] http://boringtechnology.club

[1] https://tryhexadecimal.com

[2] https://tryhexadecimal.com/costs

[3] https://cushionapp.com/running-costs

[4] https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/running-costs-f...

(Node, Redis, Mongo) pushing things to React/Vue/Angular

Everything else is just to keep nontech people busy on things you'll never do so they feel like they have a purpose and their presence helps people take your company more seriously