Building a saas to limit free access to features as part of the #wbespace accelerator program - week 1/10

Welcome to the first post in the build log of quotas.io. In this build log I will document how the quotas.io saas app is built and released from the start.

What is quotas.io?

The exact scope of the product is one of the things that I'm still working on, but the main goal of the product is to make it easy for builders of saas products to limit access to features for unregistered users, and to make the onboarding of users that have an interest to use it more as easy as possible.

📢Building in public

The goal of this series of blog posts is to publicly document what I'm building, how I'm building it, along with all the challenges and decisions that I make.

I'm building this as part of a 10 week Accelerator Program over at the Wannabe-Entrepreneur Space. It is a 10 week program where 5 bootstrappers work on their project for 10 weeks, with a demo day at the end where everyone can showcase the result.
For me, the biggest benefit of the accelerator will be the accountability aspect : every week all 5 of us will share our goals for the next week, and will talk about if and how we achieved the goals of the previous week. We'll also share our experiences and give advice and feedback.

So far, the group convinced me that I needed to have a twitter account, and I took their advice to hart, and created a twitter account (@indiedries), where I'll also be sharing the progress of building quotas.io.

🎯This week's goal

📗 What can you expect?

In this build log, I'd like to share the following types of content :

technical details on tools and services used to build quotas.io
information about what quotas.io is
insight into my tought process and the decisions and steps I take to build the product

🔍 Product Scope

The purpose of quotas.io is to allow saas products to apply quotas to functionality they allow customers to try before signing up.
Examples of saas products that use limits like this are :

moz.com Free Domain Analysis Tool
moz

ubersuggest Backlink Discovery Tool

The first version of quotas.io will have the following features :

Uniquely identify users
Apply user based quota to features
Display the quota on the customer's website
Available actions when quota is exceeded
Increase quota by signing up to an e-mail list or other form
Sign-up for an account
Statistics on usage of features

🕺 Product Audience/Target

One of my goals for this week was to define the audience or target group that I am building this product for.

The idea for this product came to me when I was building a free tool to extract links and e-mail addresses from a website, but decided that it was important to restrict the access to prevent abuse, and to be able to connect with people that found this product valuable. Restricting the access is important, because every request uses resources, and resources cost money. It's not a problem to support this, but when people start abusing this, or building tools on top of something that I offer for free, this can cause my costs to rise out of control.

Based on this, I define the target audience for the product as :

The product is intended for saas or websites that (want to) provide limited free access to features for non-registered users.