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Comment by readonthegoapp | Hacker News Reader

i vote #1.

for several reasons:

  - looking for this kind of software (and most kinds) sucks
  - these systems always seem overpriced
  - they never seem to do what you want
  - while they always do way too much
  - community gardens are cool, so deserve their own type of system
  - airtable and the like are awful (imo), unless you truly need them
  - you can open-source the software if that's your thing
  - and you can provide the .com saas hosting if that's your thing

well, as you can see, i was building my case, but then i found this:

https://www.communitygardenapp.com/

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yea actually my garden uses that community garden app, but it hasn't met the needs because users don't have the ability to update their own info. But for the amount of time I spent researching to your point, I probably could have coded half of the site by now in rails. But I guess it is always a tco of a coder using their time vs paying 80 a month which in the long term isn't that bad.

wonder if a quick email to them could get them to add that feature? seems like a side project for them all, but sounds like an easy enough (and obvious) feature.

i did a quick look for multi-tenant ruby saas boilerplate, and saw the usual list of things that don't quite do that, but all of them seem to do at least single-tenant -- and prob most would claim they do multi-tenant if you just add 5 or 50 hours of dev:

https://www.getsjabloon.com/

i don't know anything about these particular guys.

but my thinking is, you can get to (what seems like) 80 or 90% in a few hours, but that final 20 or 10% takes 50 hours more, plus ongoing maintenance/support/etc.

i'd pledge $5 at six months from now (possibly more) to see it done - just to try to kickstart it.

hey thanks for the link! Yea I think refactoring into multi tenant isn't going to be terribly hard as long as there is some foundational basics there.

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