Help! Spinning my wheels on finding SaaS tools for MVP
Hi IH -
I’ve been spinning my wheels on this and finally decided to just ask for help. I’m pretty technical and have been able to build the product for a SaaS MVP, getting more and more excited as the product itself has come together and works well. However, now I’m looking at all of the peripheral services like billing, subscription, API Key management and authentication, developer portal, marketing, etc and it is overwhelming. Yes, I could probably tackle those one by one and custom build them but I don’t see a point when those functions are the same for all SaaS businesses and none of them contribute to my business value differentiation. I’d rather use something pre-built and get to market sooner.
I’ve been trying to find a hosted solution (SaaS) that does all of the following but haven’t been able to:
- Landing page
- User management (registration, login, password reset, etc)
- Product selection and subscription
- Billing/Invoicing/Refunds/Payments
- Product usage tracking for billing purposes
- Developer Portal (documentation, self-serve, API Key management)
It looks like finding one platform that does all of the above well is too much to ask, so I’ve been looking at piecemealing together individual services. I don’t mind paying a reasonable monthly fee for a hosted platform, but since I’m bootstrapping I’m trying to keep costs down (anytime I see a product where the pricing is “ask sales” or “schedule a demo” I know right away those probably aren’t for me!)
I’m also trying to go full hosted and avoid things like BulletTrain that require customization and dev work, especially since if I were to do that I’d want the tech stack to match my product’s (.NET on AWS).
Based on the research I’ve done so far I’m considering using Chargebee for billing (generous free tier, many features and seems to be an established player) and integrating it with Stripe for payments and Tyk Cloud for API Management/developer portal. Then building my own landing page starting from a paid template. I’m not sure yet if there’s a platform that could just do user management.
This part of building a SaaS product isn’t my forte so any suggestions on a single tool or multiple tools that can integrate well with each other with minimal dev effort are much appreciated!
#ask-ih
Hi Sean, we do exactly that at DjaoDjin (https://djaodjin.com/) for the reason you need them when building a SaaS. The technology is open source on GitHub (https://github.com/djaodjin/djaoapp) and we help and charge for hosting. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thank you.
Looks intriguing. A couple of comments/feedback:
None of these items have anything to do with the actual service DjaoDjin provides, yet as a potential customer evaluating whether or not to sign up and trust DjaoDjin with some of the most sensitive parts of my customers' data, they add up to just enough that if I ran across this in the wild I would probably hit the back button and keep looking.
That being said the product itself looks worthwhile. Does it support any sort of usage-based billing?
Thank you for the feedback Sean. We fixed the typos.
I worked as a professional security engineer for many years, securing content for movie studios (yes, they are paranoid about a movie being "stolen"). Today DjaoDjin secures sensitive data for products used by the top Energy utilities (PG&E, Entergy, DTE, etc).
Every time we had to make a choice between improving security, reliability, or fixing the website copy, we chose security features. I am well aware of the issue that security is as much about wearing a nice suit and a firm handshake. I was talking just about this recently with @genemachine (https://saasgenius.io/dev-shop-to-saas-djaodjin-turns-clients-into-customers-grows-via-referrals-content-marketing/). We are looking for help to improve website copy, docs and tutorials.
At the end, security is a lot about transparency. The scripts we use to configure AWS are available on GitHub (https://github.com/djaodjin/drop) as well as the full code for the SaaS proxy (https://github.com/djaodjin/djaoapp). We will also help you deploy in your own AWS account. That is actually my preferred method right now because it avoids data concentration into DjaoDjin infrastructure.
DjaoDjin support usage-base billing (https://github.com/djaodjin/djaodjin-saas/issues/136) though the documentation is light, and the feature not directly accessible through the UI at this point.
p.s. If you are a Rails developer, you might also look at https://bullettrain.co/. Different approach but also really good to help you with those boring standard SaaS features.
Hi,
There is this https://aspnetzero.com/ bit pricey, but it may be what you need.
There's also the free https://aspnetboilerplate.com/ that netzero is based on. Doesn't have payments, but covers api/user management/multi-tenant/frontend. So just need to tie in payments, which something like chargebee provides. You'll have to integrate it though.
It's probably what I plan on using with pgsql running on aws.
Ooo, this looks interesting. I found this chart that lists the differences between the free template and the paid solution: https://docs.aspnetzero.com/documents/common/latest/Abp-Template-vs-AspNet-Zero
Thanks, this all-in-one does look promising, albeit pricey (as you mentioned). It may be overkill for me since I already have the product part developed separately. I'm hoping to find a 100% hosted solution, but I'll keep this in mind if I can't find a suitable one.