Product development starter kit - looking for feedback and insights
I'm currently working on a starter kit for my projects and I'm wondering if it would be valuable for others as well.
The goal is that it can be set up in a few minutes and handles standard requirements. That one can dive straight into the core development of the product, bypassing the typically tedious setup phase.
- User management: Registration, sign in/out, user deletion, etc.
- Subscriptions:Subscription initiation, cancellation, plan alteration, handling taxes, etc.
- Database setup
Guiding principles:
- Zero cost without traffic
- The idea behind this is to facilitate the launching of many products without the stress of incremental baseline expenses, essentially making it risk-free to start new products
- Only use technologies with gradual pricing
- Auth0 for example has quite a cost jump once you get over the free limit, so using AWS Cognito instead
- Fully customizable, no lock-in
- Products go in unforeseen directions, it should be possible to easily adapt everything based on changing needs (e.g. adding an EC2 instance)
Because the setup is technical (e.g. using Terraform for infrastructure) I imagine it's mostly interesting for software engineers.
The technologies it uses at the moment is
- NextJs for the web application
- MongoDb Atlas (serverless MongoDb) as database
- AWS Lambda (with NodeJs) for server code
- Paddle for subscription management (does tax handling!)
- Terraform for infrastructure management
An additional note: serverless is historically quite difficult to debug or develop locally. This is something I'm tackling with this project as well, that the developer experience is nice.
The great benefits (for me at least)
- Can launch new projects in minutes
- Don't need to deal with common problems over and over
- Flexible technical setup
- Very low cost
I put quite some thought into this, but I want to clarify that this isn’t a sales pitch - I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts and insights.
