HN Explorer

Ask HN: SaaS Frameworks for Startups

32 points by asadkn ↗ HN
Everyone's rolling out their own tech stack / framework solution or putting significant effort researching and putting the pieces together.

@patio11 wrote about how someone needs to create a book on it: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1219997892028448768

Know of any frameworks/stacks built specifically for SaaS startups? Something that covers al the moving parts - Auth/Roles, Billing, APIs, CRUD, Logging and so on.

Language is irrelevant but preferably in the popular ones most people already know. PHP, JS, Python, Ruby etc.

8 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread
ThePhysicist
There are SaaS solutions for some parts that you mentioned. Examples:

- Auth0 for authentication

- Stripe for payments

- Billomat for billing

For other parts there are good open source frameworks, for example:

- Hasura for building an API on top of a Postgres data schema

- Frameworks like Flask, Rails or Django for building a backends

- Frameworks like React or Vue for building a frontend

- Static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll for building your website

- Hosting companies like DO or Linode and cloud providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure to host your services

There are also more tightly integrated solutions for specific niches like e-commerce (e.g. Shopify), if you build a SaaS solution you will probably have too many aspects that are unique about your idea to use such a highly standardized solution.

asadkn
All good suggestions. Adding to this, there's a thread full of similar gems: https://twitter.com/flybayer/status/1220406529901223936

I do get that not all of these can be done and many are specific to niches. But I believe a lot of boilerplate can be done by one framework.

And an opinionated framework can do a lot. Say Payment integration modules (Stripe, Paypal et. al), Logging & Error Reporting, Opinionated Backend/Frontend and storage for basic CRUD, CI/CD integration and deployment workflows working with cloud providers, tight integration with a messaging queue etc.

Something like this could be a massive time saver in communities like Indiehackers.

m_fayer
I looked into Auth0 (and some competitors) a few years ago, and eventually figured out that, outside of a narrow usage band, it was extremely expensive given the not-trivial nature of integrating it and its various downsides. So, compared to implementing an OSS auth server/framework yourself, it just didn't seem worth it.
soneca
There are a few companies selling all of that in a single package as a SaaS boilerplate application:

If you like PHP - https://spark.laravel.com/

If you like Ruby on Rails - https://bullettrain.co/, https://www.getsjabloon.com/, https://railskits.com/

If you like NodeJS - https://usegravity.app/

If you like ASP.NET - https://aspnetzero.com/

If you like Python/Django - https://djaodjin.com/

I can't specifically recommend any of them, as I never used, but I used another one built with Rails+EmberJS that was worth the money (I am not sure if it's still supported these days, but here it is https://www.maxiomapps.com/apps/application-starter-kit/).

If you want to build a SaaS web app for problems that don't require cutting edge technology to be solved (aka most of them), I think buying one of those is a no-brainer in terms of cost/benefit.

makeee
I'm working on https://divjoy.com, a tool that generates custom React codebases. It doesn't yet cover everything a SaaS app needs, but Stripe integration, CRUD, db, etc are coming this year.