"Distributing" your SaaS
This is a case of "I don't know what I don't know", so I'll illustrate my question with a simple example.
Most products seem to follow the patter of make something, charge for it, then people log in and use it. But let's say you make something like a job board manager that allows other people to make their own board using your software. How do you do that? Say someone has their own domain and they say ok I want to use that job board software. It's no longer a case of just log in and use it, because they need their own instance of it that's tied to their domain. How does one implement something like that where a user pays for your product and then have their own copy of it, so to speak. Make sense?
They don't need their own instance at all :)
You can have them point a cname or a record to your server and by using nginx you can show them a dynamically loaded site with their logos and jobs.
Let me know if you have any more questions I have thought a lot about this weird technical problems.
I agree! If they're hosting it themselves then it's not SAAS.
The easiest way is to have a wildcard subdomain on your domain pointing to your app, then identify user/company based on subdomain and serve only their jobs to them. They can also point their domain name to your subdomain (CNAME) and it would seem like it's separate app on their own domain. At least that's how I'm doing it :)
You might want to look at a reseller or white label model, where you can charge on a subscription basis or via an App Store revenue share approach.
Alternatively, you may be interested in a federated model, where you can use something like ActivityPub to build a platform where anyone can start an instance to join the community. Monetisation might be a little bit different, but I do believe that in the years to come we’ll see a stronger focus on decentralized models, and that we ought to get ahead of it.
As @volkandkaya said - each account/customer simply needs their own Nginx config and likely DB, no need to spin up an entire separate instance unless dedicated resources is a selling point.
Sound like docker related to me.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago