Ask HN: Go to tech stack for building small SaaS in 2024?

4 points by ed_balls 2y ago ↗ HN

The following list was my goto tech stack for building small B2B SaaS at the end of 2019. Any better alternatives?

The app will manage hardware design documents for 50 customers.

fastapi/Python

Postgres

Celery for tasks

Redis for caching

React for frontend (Tailwind)

Hosting: DO app platform, heroku, k8s on AWS

Sentry for error tracking

Stripe for payments

EmailOctopus for newsletter

SendGrid for transactional emails

NameCheap for the domain

auth: Auth0 or Amplify from AWS

AWS S3 for storage

Github for code

Trello, Slack, Google docs

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] thread

aprdm 2y ago ↗

50 customers ? You can build it with Django and sqlite with zero dependencies and deploy via scp, run it on the cheapest DO and call it a day. Easy to scale later too and you will be developing/deploying the business logic from day 1

siamese_puff 2y ago ↗

Please listen to this comment. The tech stack you listed is enterprise-grade stuff. You don’t need K8s, celery, Postgres, etc to scale 50 people.

Rent a cheap VPS on Hetzner and self host this stuff. Use Cloudflare R2 instead of S3 for storage (Egress is free). Use SQLite for the DB (would easily support 50 people!). If you add a dependency truly ask yourself why you need it. That is unnecessary operational and financial overhead IMO.

lgkk 2y ago ↗

Nice call on the s3 alternative. Can it do signed URLs so that a customer can’t access another customer image or file?

codegeek 2y ago ↗

Yes https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/api/s3/presigned-urls/

thehucklecat 2y ago ↗

I think those are all good choices and I don't judge you for k8s. It all depends if you know it already. We use GKE with auto-scaling kubernetes and it's great and took 2 day to get it terraformed sufficient to where it feels like what I had at my old job.

If/when you need to start "real company stuff": AngelList Mercury Ramp Rippling HubSpot

I've been pretty impressed with all of those.