Forge – A Django SaaS Framework
djangoforge.dev
djangoforge.dev
- Showcase your reciprocal contributions you make back to django community packages (e.g. Jazzband packages).
- Release a permissively licensed django package (with no catches) under your GH's org and brand name and have it take off. (e.g. django-forge-admin)
- The holy grail would be contributions to django itself. Example: Adding more CSS variables in django admin to font-size and font-family. Add rem, %, calc, flex, etc.
- Early startups funding: $5,000 for MVPs up into 6 figures. Your price point could be a bit higher. Email early founders and see what their reaction is. Use that feedback to tailor a business-friendly license to address the concerns of people with decision making powers. Commenters opinions matter, but they're not necessarily your clientele.
- Strike custom deals to make the sale.
- Add on custom development hours and add a clause to incorporate the work back into your product for reuse.
- Expect to be reaching out to founders often, using cold email introductions, both for advice, but also to show you're flexible. Be willing to hop on a zoom, demo it, etc.
- Find early startups to use your framework for testimonials and social proofing.
- I've personally set these up before many times in django at previous places. It takes weeks of effort to bootstrap, especially if you factor in billing. No it's not 8 hours. It's weeks of effort.
My only doubt is, I think you may ultimately make more money striking big deals to do development work. What's more efficient, a $100-$150k deal with one customer or being on the hook for 100 customers?
On the 1 customer vs 100, I totally lean towards the 100. I have a blend of these with https://www.pullapprove.com/ and the higher the price, the more it feels like you just work for them. Pros and cons, but personally I don't want something that looks like freelance/consulting/employment.
For example, imagine there are a bunch of startups trying their hardest to shoe-horn contributions in Django main branch. It puts a lot of load on core developers at Django to reject frivolous features and unnecessary bloat.
The end effect would be that we get features no one asks for and Django becomes even more bloated.
Django is already a very popular framework and has many contributors.
There are some parts of django core that are stable, but fundamentally broke for non-trivial apps. Let's just take /admin:
- Can inline admin models be paginated? Searched? Both? Asynchronously?
- Use autocomplete_fields by default via ID/PK lookup / when `search_fields` exist. Right now related fields will load the whole table into a <select> box. This is an absurd default.
Other opportunities that'd be universal:
- Integrate channels into admin
- AJAX form validation
- Revision history that includes actual values / diffs / undo
Formulating it a bit provocative: In what way is it more than an expensive cookiecutter repository? (Especially with a one-time-use policy per subscription)
Me too — trying to figure that out!
> but that project needs to be basically non existent while also being somewhat serious
Super interesting point. I've helped integrate it into some existing projects and it is not fun.
> In what way is it more than an expensive cookiecutter repository?
I don't disagree with this. A couple differences in my mind are support (that you're paying for, and has an incentive to be as helpful as possible) and on-going updates (a cookiecutter won't help you integrate improvements over time, as far as I know).
Pricing is totally an experiment right now, and I shot high on purpose. Suggestions?
Absolutely true. I remember the amount of hate HN spewed at Docker for making their desktop app /paid/ for Corp users.
> support (that you're paying for, and has an incentive to be as helpful as possible) and on-going updates (a cookiecutter won't help you integrate improvements over time, as far as I know).
That's true, good point.
> Suggestions?
I think it highly depends on your target audience.
> Things like django-coookiecutter are great, but they only really cover the project structure.
In the past few months I've been working on side projects and have gone through the process of setting up a similar template (just for my own use), which I've used with two different side projects.
I think my interest in buying this is not so much to replace my own template but to borrow parts of it.
From the borrow perspective, I wonder if this could be worth it to some established, non-agency companies that use Django.
Really nice code you can copypasta over? Doesn't take too much of that to get to $1000 of value.
Would have no issue with some people paying for access, borrowing some stuff, and being a part of a "community" of people sharing variations of the ideas and occasionally factoring that in to the Forge code itself, copying it out, etc.
Another thing I like about this project: I've always felt that the rails community does a better job than the django community in the out-of-the-box experience of setting up a new app. This project seems to bring some of that niceness to the django world (and would be similar to https://jumpstartrails.com/).
Would also recommend people listen to the first episode of https://www.frameworkfriends.com/ if they are thinking about these kinds of things.
I'm finding it super helpful for my own purposes if nothing else. There are some topics that Django (understandably) doesn't get into, but also some rough edges that could use smoothing over (in my opinion).
You need to be an expert user to make use of this.
An expert user can likely already do this. And likely has differing opinions about some of your choices (maybe not a Heroku fan, like I would personally only ever run Django on GCP).
Totally unproven yet, but I also think there could be an interesting community aspect. If everybody "in" Forge is essentially paying to be there, I think could have a really great place to ask questions and get help from people who are building stuff with a similar mindset to yourself.
This is an important point, for me anyway.
Yeah $1000 can be a lot for an individual (myself included), especially for a hobby/side project. For individuals, at this price, it's probably more of "I've built a small revenue generating project before, and I'm going to skip some steps this time + connect with some other people doing it in a similar way"?
However, in my experience (have a similar product geared towards API backends: https://apibakery.com), many developers will stop at "boilerplate", think "cookiecutter", and balk away.
The most vocal complaints for me were:
- it's just boilerplate, therefore how dare you charge
- I can do that in an hour (all devs are optimists :)
- why should I pay a recurring fee for a one-off use (valid, and made me rethink my pricing strategy)
Ultimately, I suspect your users will mainly be founders who just want to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible. If you haven't already, engage with communities such as IndieHackers and r/SaaS.
Good luck!
The docs show me what words to type to get your product, but not what your product gives me. From what I figured out it gives me a lot of django stuff. So should I go away now to learn all that djange stuff (probably yes), but then why do I need django forge?
The best explanation is the heading of the video. But still, what is the benefit. How difficult is it to build a SaaS with vanilla django, and how much easier is it with django-forge. I couldnt figure that out.
Can you make a video, where you show how to make a full fledged SaaS with django-forge and deploy it? How long would that video be?
Well put.
Yeah I'm not 100% sure yet what level of Django experience is required to use (or at least appreciate) Forge? Should you have used Django at least once before on a project? Gone through the official Django tutorial maybe (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/intro/tutorial01/)? At the moment, if you have not actually used Django before then I probably would recommend you go through their tutorial and THEN try Forge (or watch the video / read https://www.djangoforge.dev/docs/start/).
Some differences will immediately jump out — they'll tell you very (very) little about how to manage your dependencies, local environment, hosting/deploying, configuring settings with "secrets" for local vs production, the fact you'll probably want a custom AUTH_USER model later and it will be super hard to change, etc. But yeah, to sell those as differences, you do need to have a baseline familiarity or else I need to do a really thorough job of explaining and pointing them out ahead of time.
I think the gist, if you compared vanilla Django to Forge, would be that vanilla Django is almost completely open-ended. There are a lot of decisions you're going to have to make, and research you're probably going to have to do. Forge removes a lot of those decisions and makes them for you. Some are easy to spot up front, but others not until you're further down the road or have more experience...
> Can you make a video, where you show how to make a full fledged SaaS with django-forge and deploy it? How long would that video be?
Videos are absolutely the way to go. I'll try to do more and run through more of the parts and maybe a complete process. That first video I made stops short of deploying to Heroku, but it's maybe 5 minutes away from being deployed. Beyond that, basically every "topic" in the sidebar could use at least one video.
The Rails equivalent (https://jumpstartrails.com/) is $249/year and the Laravel equivalent (https://spark.laravel.com/) is $99/project.
Those seem geared in features and price at hobbyist wanting to monetize a side project. This looks like it would be just as helpful for hobbyists using Django, but it’s not priced right for them.
Maybe it’s more for people who are about to start a second revenue project.
> Maybe it’s more for people who are about to start a second revenue project.
I do think this is an interesting point that's come up a couple times now.
For what it's worth, I just added a 50% discount to the top of the page for the time being.
* Forge the Django SaaS framework
I'm sure other things use the name "Forge" but just seems odd you'd purposefully use the same one. Could also make your SEO rather difficult.
Based on the quote above boilerplates are for people who are more founder-y than dev-y. Some see codebase as solution, some see code as solution.
Honestly I feel a little weird "competing" directly with something like this, but such is life. Thanks to everyone who has made something similar (in any ecosystem), which is part of what got me over the hump of thinking it was even possible. I'm glad Django is getting some options and new ideas!
In this case there's probably room for a handful of small players at least, and certainly many people will have different opinions about what the "right" way to build a Django SaaS should be, so it makes sense there would be multiple products in the space.
At first glance Forge looks like it's trying to be more upmarket and more opinionated than Pegasus, while Pegasus is more price-accessible and flexible. Certainly there are pros and cons to both positions.
Good luck! I'm sure we'll see each other on the battlefield. :)
Do you plan on providing a hosted version as well, or just the core shipped package?
From what I understand, the update process for Pegasus is also a little bit more manual? Forge is intentionally set up to be a git remote, with directories and stuff named so that an update is essentially `git merge django-forge/main`.
Probably lots of little differences when you get into it — just different decisions from different people. Hoping to document more of Forge soon!
With that out of the way, I think having more opinionated Django frameworks is a great thing. Particularly around styling and forms.
I also think it's interesting to try to "productize" (I think there's a better word) what is often done as consulting. That is, bottling up and selling experience. So while the price may seem high, there's a ton of wisdom behind it. An experienced Django consultant is easily thousands of dollars per week.
I wish you the best!
Is there a free trial?
Unfortunately, because of the logistics of how this works, there is no free trial period. We do our best to give you an idea of what you're buying via public documentation, videos, and an overview of the repo. If you buy it and truly decide you aren't going to use it, contact us about a refund.
Happy to give out some discounts if people are interested in that.
why would any business want this?
> why would any business want this?
An existing business building a new product? A new business getting off the ground? Don't know exactly yet.
https://www.djangoproject.com/trademarks/
"You may not incorporate the Django name or logo into the name of any product to be sold by a commercial entity, regardless of whether that product or service is Django-related."