SAAS App development for developers

My take on the specific issues you've posed:

For UI, just use a CSS framework or look into something like Tailwind UI. You can get quite far with "out of the box" components and don't need to be particularly "good" at it.

For tech stack, go with what you know best. It doesn't matter at this stage.

For the foundation, take a look at this other thread where that topic came up: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-do-you-deal-with-all-the-boilerplate-saas-functionality-bb23709d35. I'd encourage you to read through for some thoughts on your options and how to think about them.

I have been thinking the same thing. Everything I have made so far has been over-engineered, I'm currently practising making "clunky" things so I can be faster at creating at an MVP. By clunky I mean I'm happy to redirect to the AWS cognito UI for auth, and to the Stripe checkout and subscription management pages. I'm trying to use as much pre-built stuff as I can for things that aren't the core app. I have only made one app this way so far.

For page layout I just use bootstrap, the MVP doesn't have to look amazing, it's to test an idea.

I build all my back-end MVP stuff in the serverless framework, which uses cloud formation to deploy to AWS, this is good enough for me :) one day it will be in a pipeline if the idea works.

So far I have only used Angular for the front end, I deploy this by manually running the build command and uploading it to S3, again one day it'll be in a pipeline.

I have found it hard to make the mental shift to doing things this way.

I think there is really 2 categories of technical work that goes into your SaaS.

There is the actual product that will have very different level of difficulty. In our case, with hookdeck.io it's just complex backend and DevOps work to build sufficiently reliable product to be worth anything. On the flipside, us building this, we are making it easier to for others to then build their own SaaS.

The second is the operational stuff such as authentication, billing, dahsboard, etc. To me it still seems like it takes too much time to build that out. This is where the low-code solution comes in like Stripe subscriptions. They now offer this fleshed out UI for your customers to manage their billing and subscriptions, thing you would have had to build before. Regardless you still have to build out your plan rules, feature locking etc. Hopefully as time goes by we will get to spend more time on the product!

i'm sharing my process of building a #commsaas here.

subscribing to this post to see what folks share!