Launching Thursday: the backend I rebuilt 5 times is now a product (2 founders, bootstrapped, 0% fee)

Every product I've built started the same way: two to three weeks of work that had nothing to do with the product.

Login. Stripe. Workspaces. Roles. Usage limits. Emails. Webhooks.

I did it for Imejis. Then AgentCenter. Then PlugNode, RemoteWait and LinkTracer. By the third, I was copy-pasting and fixing the same bugs in new places. By the fifth, I'd extracted enough that it was clearly its own thing.

That's BuildBase, and it launches on Product Hunt this Thursday.

What it is, in numbers

• 1 npm install (@buildbase/sdk) for React / Next.js
• 20 integrated modules: auth, billing, usage metering, workspaces, RBAC, workflows, email, notifications, feature flags, webhooks, analytics, and more
• 120+ API endpoints, 40+ React hooks, 8 locales
• 5 of our own products running on it in production
• 2 founders
• $0 raised

Decisions I'd defend in any comment thread

No free plan. Paid from day one, with a 7-day trial. Free tiers attract people who will never pay, and we're too small to subsidise them.

Bring your own Stripe, 0% platform fee. Most backend tools take a cut or scale their price with your revenue. Your customers pay you, into your own account.

Self-hosting costs more than cloud, not less. You get our Docker images on your own infra with your own MongoDB and Redis. That's the premium option, and it's priced like one.

Per-app pricing. One app = one org = one isolated database. You don't pay for scale you aren't using.

What it isn't (yet)

React/Next.js only. Not open source: self-hosting means compiled images, not source access. The SDK is v0.x. I'd rather you hear that from me than find it in the docs.

The launch

Sep 25, 12:01 AM PT. PH visitors get 50% off for 3 months. I'll be in the comments all day.

My question for you:

• if you've built more than one SaaS, how much of your second product was really just your first product's backend? And what would it take for you to trust someone else's?