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20 Comments

Best Saas Tools/Frameworks to launch faster?

Hey all,

I was wondering what Saas tools or frameworks are out there to help me launch my own Saas project faster (I’m working on a new API, more to share on that soon). To be clear I’m an engineer so I can code but I prefer to use 3rd party tools and frameworks as much as possible so I can get to market faster and spend more time on validating my idea, acquiring customers and retaining them.

I imagine everyone has to build pretty much the same stuff so what are the industry’s best practices for:

  • Creating (and designing) landing pages and marketing websites to get new signups
  • Creating a Dashboard (where the customer can login to retrieve API keys, look at some stats and manage billing etc)
  • API metering and throttling (I’m going to charge based on API usage)
  • Hosted API documentation and ideally SDK code generation
  • Email drip campaign (checking in couple times as a founder during the trial period)
  • Metered monthly billing (I assume Stripe but maybe there are better players out there?)
  • Blog for SEO

Any tips would be highly appreciated!

  1. 5

    That is the stack I would use

    1. 1

      Versoly is exactly what I need, thanks!

      1. 1

        @volkandkaya when do you recommend to use NextJS vs Supabase? which use cases are they good for

        1. 1

          Use nextjs and supabase when you require a single page application.

      2. 0

        Be careful! Versoly generates security errors in certain browsers: https://twitter.com/adamllui/status/1392070810941026304/photo/1

        Not only will this impair your brand's credibility, but visitors will feel unsafe. Volkand was simply spamming his app (notice it's the first bullet) because he's struggling to acquire customers (even after 3+ years of building.)

        Use any one of countless alternatives that don't generate errors and thus not unfairly increase your bounce rate.

        Just a short list for your convenience:

  2. 2

    I would say Next.js with Firebase for the Database & Authentication + Stripe as payments is a great stack to get something robust up and running fast. In fact Lee Robinson who works at Next.js has a great course (FREE) that goes through the steps you need to build out a starter with all these features: https://react2025.com/

    You can use it and tweak to your own product.

    If you want nice production ready Next.js templates you can check out my site too :)
    https://nextails.com/

    1. 1

      Have you tried supabase? :)

      I tried firebase a few times and found it very difficult.

      1. 1

        firebase and supabase for authentification are basically the same in my experience.
        i will only use supabase instead of firebase if my data is highly relational, otherwise i don't see the benefits ( maybe the pricing if i have a high number of users but this is a nice problem to have)

      2. 1

        Firebase has worked fine for me so far although it can get expensive in certain cases at scale. I might try Supabase at some point. :)

    2. 1

      Cool, I will checkout Next.js and Nextails!

  3. 2

    My stack is
    Api-platform based on Symfony
    Quasar based on VueJs
    Tailwind
    MailGun
    Ubuntu 18
    MySQL
    Stripe

  4. 2

    Figma
    Nextjs ( or plain react if i don't need server side rendering)
    Firebase or supabase depending if i need a relational database or not
    Tailwind
    chakra-ui
    Sendgrid
    Vercel if using Nextjs / heroku otherwise
    stripe

    1. 1

      What are you using Figma for? I believe chakra-ui comes with components you can start building with.

      1. 1

        I am using Figma for the design.
        Chakra-ui is a library of components that i use to put up prototypes quickly, but it can be used in production too, you have also ant design, react-bootstrap or material-ui, but i like more the look and feel of chakra-ui components

        1. 1

          I usually go from paper to code if I have a UI library already.

          Any added benefit off using figma first?

          1. 1

            on paper i cannot tinker with colors, spacing or typography... Even if i use the UI library, it is very highly customizable, which means if i have a button , i can still change its size, coloring, border-radius, font size... what i do is having a high fidelity design of what i am envisionning first before coding it, and customize the components to stick to my design. As a matter of fact for me the UI library helps me more in that it has many helpers built in components usually , for example for a button, it has a loading state, disabled state, primary/secondary ... as for the styling i usually end up changing the whole style of the components to stick to my design

  5. 2

    My stack is

    • Nextjs
    • Vercel
    • Tailwind
    • AWS (API/back end, DB, analytics, monitoring)
    • SendGrid (might be switching over to AWS SES)

    If you're looking for an authentication service I'm about to launch Crow Authentication. I'd be more than happy to give you early access if you want to play around with it though. It's all based on simple APIs so it's totally language and framework agnostic. I built an example of how I'm expecting to use it with Nextjs though if you want a quick start.

    1. 1

      Have you checked out Supabase for auth, works really nicely.

      For AWS SES do you plan to also use it for email marketing?

  6. 2
    • Figma for design, because it allows you to collaborate and is a fantastic tool
    • Stripe for payments, because the API is amazing and you can use the prebuild customer portal to easily manage subscriptions or checkout for single payments
    • Pirsch Analytics (https://pirsch.io/ shameless self promotion here) for web analytics, because you don't need a cookie banner and respect the privacy of your visitors while getting insight what content works best
    • Hugo or some docs service for documentation and blog (Hugo generates a static website from Markdown)
    • AWS SES for emails, becauses it's cheap (10ct for 1000 emails) and is reliable
  7. 1

    For metering and metered usage i would checkout https://www.amberflo.io/

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