Ask HN: Which tools do you use for SaaS customer management? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which tools do you use for SaaS customer management?

7 pointsk__7 comments

I trying to spin up a SaaS, so I need to track customer registrations, which plans they have subscribed to and what addons they use.

What is your approach to this?

My first idea was to build something on my own, but this is a problem every SaaS provider has, so there should be something pre-made out there. Like launchrock for gathering email addresses.

View on HN

Well, I'm a web developer, so I rolled my own. I built a reusable framework for SaaS projects with just the kind of features you mention, and I've been using it both for myself as well for freelance clients.

Basically it's a PHP framework with a lot of SaaS-specific features built in. With each new project I implemented more and more features on it, to the point where I can now launch a functional MVP quite rapidly.

Lately (like, this week!) I got the idea of trying to license this framework to others, as well as sell them my web development services for the rest of their project. To this end, I published a quick LP (http://turbomvp.com/), which I'm now trying to improve, because I've been told it's not really clear at all what I'm offering :)

I haven't yet figured out the licensing model either, this is still a very rough idea. The framework, however, is really cool.

I'm thinking of doing what you're doing, but with Laravel.

Let's say you have 3-4 SaaS sites all based upon your 'Core SaaS framework', when you make a change to the core framework, how do you manage this with your independent sites? Do you treat the independent sites as forks of the core framework and patch changes in? All manual? Or once you've started to build on the core framework do you simply accept that it's now an individual product and the core never changes?

Hi iDemonix,

Sorry for the late reply, I just came back from vacation.

I currently apply any updates manually, yes, I don't have an auto-update solution in place. Furthermore, sometimes a customer will ask for some custom feature that I can only implement by editing the actual framework, so at any point in time each customer may be running a custom version that cannot be auto-updated anyway.

> Or once you've started to build on the core framework do you simply accept that it's now an individual product and the core never changes?

Something like that, yes. I currently treat each implementation as a separate project, so I don't worry about backwards compatibility too much when I implement a new features. However, I am looking into changing this workflow, since I'm not really satisfied with how updates are currently rolled out.

Depending on who you use for payment services you may be able to leverage their solution. For example Stripe has a good majority of the features you need including subscription tracking etc. you can have every customer with a unique id that ties back to your system and stores more detailed custom attributes.

We kinda do this, in that we let stripe manage the subscriptions etc, we just store all the relevant data back in our database. So if we ever had to switch payment providers we can without losing any data or historical accuracy. But it did really make getting running pretty fast and easy.

In your experience, is Stripe's subscription features good enough? When would I ever use something like a Chargify/Recurly?

RAILS: Use Devise for Login / Registration. For subscriptions there are some good stripe gems.

https://github.com/thefrontside/stripe-rails https://github.com/plataformatec/devise

I use retain.cc for SaaS customer management.

Apart from tracking customer registration, they could even track anonymous behaviors too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com