Building a developer infrastructure platform for SaaS founders — curious what backend tools people struggle with the most.
Hi everyone 👋
I’m Corey, a full-stack developer currently building Operra, a developer infrastructure platform designed to help SaaS founders move faster when building backend systems.
The idea came from something I kept running into while working on different projects.
When building SaaS products, developers often have to spend a huge amount of time rebuilding the same backend infrastructure over and over again:
- Authentication systems
- Multi-tenant organizations
- API key management
- Billing and Subscriptions
- Usage tracking
- Developer APIs
- Internal admin tools
All of this is important, but it slows down the actual product development.
So the goal with Operra is to create a platform where founders can plug in these systems instead of rebuilding them every time.
Right now I'm working on the early architecture and MVP.
I’m curious about something from other founders and developers here:
What backend systems have been the most painful or time-consuming to build for your SaaS?
Some examples:
- Authentication
- Billing / Stripe integrations
- User permissions
- API infrastructure
- Background jobs
- Analytics / usage tracking
Would love to hear what parts of backend infrastructure people struggle with the most.
"Building Operra to tackle the 'SaaS plumbing' problem is a smart move, Corey. Multi-tenant organization logic and usage tracking are notorious for becoming technical debt nightmares if they aren't handled right from day one.
Solving the infrastructure bottleneck so founders can focus on their core product is a massive value-add. This developer-focused platform would actually be a great entry for the current competition; entry is $19 and the winner gets a trip to Tokyo.
Prize pool just opened at $0. Your odds are the best right now. Definitely worth a look while you're refining the early architecture and MVP!
Personally, I've found complex RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and billing sync to be the biggest headaches."
Billing / Stripe by a mile. Not the initial integration — that part is actually straightforward. The pain is maintaining correct state over time.
Stripe fires webhooks, but they arrive out of order, get retried silently, and occasionally just fail. So your DB ends up with a subscription status that doesn't match what Stripe actually has. You don't find this until a user who canceled still has access, or a paying user gets locked out. At that point you're doing manual reconciliation against the Stripe dashboard.
Auth (especially if you need multi-tenant org switching) is a close second, but there are more battle-tested libs for that. Billing genuinely has very few good abstractions that hold up past the basic "create a checkout session" use case.
Background jobs and analytics are painful too, but they fail in more obvious ways. Billing failures are silent and compound.
One question for your roadmap: are you thinking of this as a set of SDKs that wrap these services, or actual hosted infrastructure that founders connect to? The tradeoff matters a lot — SDKs ship faster but founders still own the ops; hosted infra takes longer to build but removes the maintenance burden entirely.
That’s a really helpful breakdown.
What you said about billing matches a lot of what I’ve been thinking — the initial Stripe integration is one thing, but keeping state correct over time seems like the real problem. Webhook ordering, retries, reconciliation, and entitlement drift all feel like infrastructure problems more than just application logic.
That’s also why I’m leaning more toward Operra being hosted infrastructure rather than just SDKs. SDKs would be faster to ship, but founders would still own the operational pain. The longer-term goal is to remove more of that maintenance burden instead of just wrapping it.
Auth and multi-tenant org switching are high on my list too for the same reason — they look straightforward at first, but get much harder once real edge cases show up.
Really appreciate this response. The billing/state-sync side is definitely reinforcing where I should focus the roadmap.