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Ask HN: What's your SaaS stack recommendation?

10 points by loumf ↗ HN
I'm interested in hearing recommendations for web app stacks for SaaS applications. I know this is broad -- here's my attempt at narrowing it down

   * For a side project that I hope to grow to a business.
   * Cheap for MVP / Customer Dev period
   * Not gigantic scale: B2B app where 500 customers would be successful
   * I'd like to host on something more like Heroku than Amazon (need ease of use over power)
   * Probably will be in python / Django
   * Would like very simple payments integration. Ideally, I don't need a merchant account to start
   * Email processing (sending and receiving), but not high volume
Heroku looks good -- but, some of their add-ons look like they'd be ruby-only. Looks like you can start at $50/month (web dyno + prod DB) -- any other options?

3 comments

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onitica
You might want to check out Microsoft Azure. I use it and it is powerful and has a good free trial. Only thing that is bad about it is fairly long deployment times (10 to 30 minutes). As a disclaimer I currently use it with C#, but it recently added support for python. Other than that, Heroku is a good choice. Google App Engine may be another possibility, though I haven't used it nor do I know a lot about it.

For e-mail I recommend Sendgrid, you can get 200 e-mails a day free. Also easy to integrate in.

For payments I've used Braintree and I like it. I didn't set up the account but I was given a sandbox account to try it out and it should be possible to get one. Easy to use, especially if all you are doing are transactions (even though subscriptions aren't bad on Braintree either).

bmelton
Cheap for MVP / Dev = Dotcloud [http://dotcloud.com/]. Costs nothing to use as a dev platform, you just get few resources (which you don't need, since you have no users). Publish it live, enable billing, and scale up or down as needed. Scale down to keep costs low where not needed. SUPER easy to use, especially with Python.

Scale doesn't really affect recommendations either way if you're using Python/Django. You'll still want to use Celery, but scaling everywhere except DB is fairly prescriptive. Not knowing how the data is structured, be sure to look at Mongoengine. I've been using it with Django lately and loving the simplicity.

Ease of use for hosting = Dotcloud again. Super super simple. Promise. Integrates with github to version your app, no cost to get started, and deploys are as simple as 'dotcloud push . <appname>'.

Simple payments integration = Stripe [http://stripe.com]. My last app went from not having billing to doing recurring subscription billing with Stripe in about 20 minutes. It's hard to get easier than that. Similar terms to Paypal, supports major CCs.

For email processing, a lot of people recommend Sendgrid or Mailgun, but I've found that I actually really like Amazon SES for this. There's no free tier, but it's dirt cheap to use, and once you'd get into the paid tiers for the other services, I've found that SES still comes out cheaply.

sprobertson
I've never used Dotcloud (my go-to is AWS) but I strongly agree with all the other suggestions.

You didn't mention a web framework, but I've found Bottle.py [http://bottlepy.org/] to be great for putting together projects of all sizes. Set yourself up with Github and write some deployment scripts with Fabric [http://fabfile.org/] and you're all set.