Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

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This could be interesting for agencies and freelancers more than the customers themselves.

I own a consultancy and I might find this interesting as I don't have an internal SaaS framework yet.

The two problems I see are:

1. Lack of options... There may be some parts of the stack that I don't like or don't fit requirements

2. Unknown code quality... Cannot tell what the coding standards are. This is related to #1 in that I don't know how hard the code will be to modify unless I read it.

Otherwise it's an interesting proposition. React/Nextjs are my jam, and I prefer serverful (Django) to serverless but that might be negotiable. But even if I wanted to drop in my own server, if the front-end is well coded I could easily save 2x-3x the 1.8k sticker price in dev costs on a single project.

If I were to build a SaaS myself, I might also find this interesting with all the caveats above, but I would 200% certain not pay a revenue share unless the platform really required minimal tweaking and was about 90% adjusted to my use case, and provided continued platform value after that launch (like, say, Shopify).

I mean I think a lot of people want to build a SaaS, but it's a lot of work. You need to build a landing site, set up pricing plans, integrate with Stripe, build user authentication, build company accounts + team invites, and that's just for an MVP, not including the product itself.

If you can get all of that for free (to start), and that saves you months of building, that's pretty worthwhile. At $1m ARR you're only spending $30k/yr on the platform, which is roughly what your AWS/Stripe bill is anyway.

There can definitely be more features too like user permissions, A/B testing, CMS, analytics/tag manager integration, etc, etc that continue to deliver value / save you time/money/effort as you grow.

It's hard to build alll those things you mentioned in a deep enough fashion to make it something people would use (Which is where I think this template lands). Entire companies are dedicated to each vertical.

These all things we wanted to tackle at Clerk (https://www.clerk.dev) as a SaaS. The first thing we hit down that path is user authentication -- and that opened up an entire can of worms we're still working through. User authentication alone has been tough enough because you can't just build yet another Auth0 clone and brand it "passwordless"... you'll have a tough time competing against the incumbents. This has led us to session management, which proved tricky to get right across local development and production environments, and has led is to the disparate ways people authenticate, which is a massive API design challenge. However, we think it could be a game changer, especially with all the Next.js / React advancements as of late. Especially the component-ization of the frontend in conjunction managed backends, session management feels like something that ties it all together.

I'm certainly excited for the next decade of developer tools :). Things will get dramatically easier with all these commoditized verticals.

Yeah it's definitely not a company you could bootstrap with 2 people. You'd need funding to build the team and product. But once you've actually built everything and gotten traction it'd be really hard for competitors to catch up because nobody is ever cancelling... Great VC business tbh

Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform

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