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Ask HN: “Business” framework around a SaaS

5 points by pnathan ↗ HN
Hi,

I'm wondering if there exist a set of good practices for building the customer/accounts/payments framework around a SaaS product. I imagine they tend to be similar from product to product. However, I've not personally run across them.

Regards, Paul

4 comments

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iqonik
I did some research on this before, I found that intercom.io is a must-have and can handle automated communication with your customers, Stripe is probably the best payment option and the account management will need to be home-rolled and utilize the API's of the aforementioned providers.

I'm sure there is something out there, I just haven't come across it yet!

anderspetersson
Have not used it myself, but https://www.userapp.io might be similar to what you're looking for.
pnathan
Daaaaaang. It is, kind of. I was more hoping for some level of code library rather than a SaaS. Feels scary trusting my accounts to a third party!
saluki
You're going to want to roll your own customer/accounts/auth system to meet your apps needs (lots of frameworks have gems/packages to handle most of this, rails/laravel) . . . login/logout/password reset/dashboard/app specific features.

Handle payments using stripe.com, it can handle subscriptions as well. You can store your customers stripe id and pull up their invoices, next billing date, last 4 of their cc, etc via the stripe api to show in their profile. And setup stripe api hooks to keep track of any failed billings (show a reminder when they log in) and other events that happen on the stripe side of things.

There are all kinds of smart ways to set things up with regard to signups, failed billings, tracking user logins/engagement. And there are always new ideas/best practices evolving.

For transactional emails I recommend mandrill.com.

Good luck in 2015.