Recommendation on a SaaS boilerplate project?
I think this should have been asked before, but my search did not return anything really interesting. So here is my request for a recommendation.
I am working on a tool to generate UML sequence diagram from TEXT (www.zenuml.com). I would like to convert it to a SaaS application. It is a one man project, and I don't really have much time to write all the non-core features. Basically, I need a boilerplate project that provides the following features:
Must-have:
- User registration;
- Payment / Subscription.
Nice-to-have:
3. Cheap hosting (thinking $10/mon)
4. SEO friendly;
5. Integrated blog.
If you know codepen.io, I am looking forward to a "very" light codepen.io. I know Wordpress can do that but still I feel the integration could be of a lot of effort.
Have you seen https://spark.laravel.com seems a good starting place and version 6 is right around the corner that has some nice improvements.
Looks promising. Are you using it?
Yes, but not on a live project yet. V 6 is due for release soon that has a few improvements as well as moving to bootstrap 4
Did I not mention payment in the nice to have feature list? 🙃
Hi @MrCoder,
I've reviewed some Rails SaaS Boilerplate solutions that are worth checking out:
Limestone Accounts is an open source boilerplate SaaS app built with Rails 5.2. It's well maintained and updated regularly.
Sjabloon, don't let the confusing name fool you, this is a full featured Rails SaaS starter kit that allows you to focus on what's important for your business.
RailsKits, skip the boring stuff and dive right into the code that makes your SaaS unique.
Bullet Train, this is a Ruby on Rails Saas-in-a-box.
I've done a lot of research with these solutions (and others like it) so feel free to ask any questions you may have!
Here are the useful tools for large and SAAS applications.
I'm using Quick Admin Panel and Voyager. Will try Spark, when it releases 6th version.
All are the above tools are based on Laravel. If you consider Laravel, go with Vue Js.
All the best.
A newer SaaS boilerplate for node.js is at https://nodex.wensia.com/
@MrCoder I know this is a late reply but hopefully helpful. I found your discussion while googling SaaS boilerplates.
My team and I recently coauthored an open source SaaS boilerplate web app that includes user authentication (Google), user profiles, transactional emails (AWS SES), newsletters (MailChimp), file upload (AWS S3), document collaboration (Github), among other features. We're adding payments via Stripe soon!
It's built with React, Material-UI, Next, MobX, Express, Mongoose, MongoDB, Typescript.
Here's the project: https://github.com/async-labs/saas
Hope this helps! And nice job on ZenUML.
I'm not sure you can do this with wordpress. probably you should create your own UML tech. So you have to learn these tech stuff.
And I would recommend firebase for every bootstrappers. Because free to starting, built-in https, free sms auth and other auth stuff, realtime database etc, SDK's for all platforms. Its great to start. And you can use cloud functions (node.js) and you can use UML packages here; https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=uml
I have abstracted common codebase of all my SAASs that run off WordPress in a separate plugin - WPStackPro.com (It has barebones Paddle.com payment integration)
And considering you get all the WordPress (CMS/Blog/Ecosystem of plugins/themes) at your disposal, I think this is a great solution.
I plan to expand its feature set a lot this year.
Hey @ashfame
What is the status of this - were you able to dedicate some time and get more features in?
Do you have any demo?
Not really! But you can sign up for a free account on one of my products to see how it looks & works as a customer - https://httpscop.com
If you are comfortable with Rails + Ember, this is a great solution: https://www.maxiomapps.com/apps/application-starter-kit/
I bought it to build my own SaaS and I am happy so far. But I am far from finishing it, not even touched most of the features, much less put in production. So still not a confident recommendation.
I just heard that the company that is selling these launched hyperlogs.com, using their own kit. So it gives an idea what you can accomplish.
I am slowly building one of these for myself as I realised that not wanting to do the work to on the not core features made me always fail to get anything off the ground. Though I guess it needs to be specific to your tech stack. I'm building one in Java/Spring sort of like an even faster version of start.spring.io so I can crank out production ready stuff quickly. For C# the default starter projects are quite good in that they work out of the box. A PHP guy recommend laravel to me for PHP projects for this reason too
I could not for the life of me work out how to use your tool when I clicked through and tried to have a play btw.
This is a very important piece of feedback. May I know where you have got confused? The UI or how the DSL/code should be written or something else? Thanks in advance.
So it's a lot more clear on my desktop. I was on my mobile before and the UI realllllly isn't optimized for that. Probably not something you would use on a mobile device anyway though, so perhaps it's not important.
Glad to hear this. Otherwise I am very concerned :)
Are you full-time on your project? I am interested to hear about your story or any progress.
Progress gets made on it as I work on various projects and when I'm not doing a project, then I specifically take a course to learn something that will further the boilerplate project. As it stands I've got a series of repos built up where I have solved some of the main challenges that I need when starting any project and currently I copy/paste from them when starting a new project. My vision though is to put it all into one repo that I can clone and like you say it's got user management, payments, database delivery, security etc all built in and I can just turn on/off features I don't need or strip them out. At this rate I'd say by the end of the year I'll likely have it complete.
If you are using Java, have you tried JHipster? I used it in my job projects and liked it very much. I am not sure if I should use it in my side project though. It feels too heavy for my project and lack of payment features.
I've not used it but yes, looks like the concept I'm going for. Stuff like this makes sense because you can start further along. Though it looks like JHipster goes a bit too heavy-weight in certain areas for me. Mainly Angular front-end and use of Netflix OSS. Though those are fantastic choices if you are going to be doing something you know will have scale straight out of the gate, not so much if you're coding shit you are trying to validate while still fitting it on the AWS free-tier.
Shame on me. It is supposed to be used by developers without help. Does this help anyway? https://modeling-languages.com/zenuml-drawing-sequence-diagram-easier-faster/
I have been looking for this too!
I think payment should be in must-have ;)
I think you are right. It is only not my top priority but definitely a must have.
I don't know if there is any "boilerplate" but there are a lot of ready-to-use frameworks that have many features already integrated. Don't expect easy integration with your code anyway.
My current site is based on stackedit.io. that's the level of easiness in taking about. WordPress is of too much effort even if I had php experience.
Hmmm sounds strange to me. I don't have any experience in PHP and WP was not hard to use. I have never touched its code and had several projects based on it.