Rethinking our SaaS idea

I‘ve been working on a SaaS idea together with a friend for the last year or so: we‘ve both noticed that there‘s not much insight into the reliability and performance of GitLab CI pipelines when working as freelancers for clients with a bigger dev team.

So we thought: we should change that and come up with a product that shows you average duration, reliability, time to deploy, etc. for your CI pipelines. And of course we started building a SaaS right away, cause who doesn‘t love thinking about that sweet MRR?

One year in, we haven‘t launched yet, for one we‘re both too in love with technology and enjoy building for the sake of it. At the same time we‘re pretty busy with client work and both have families with young kids.

Lately I‘ve been wondering if we‘ve jumped head-in too fast. In fact, I‘m sure. We should have paused a little bit, thought about an easier solution for the problem we‘re seeing and experienced ourselves, and built that.

That‘s what I‘m doing now: building a CLI that gives you metrics for a single GitLab CI project, right from your terminal, for free. You install it, provide a GitLab API key, point it to a repository and within a few seconds you‘ll see all the numbers we think are important. No signup, login, account management, beautiful UI, etc., just the pure numbers.

If people are excited about that, we‘ll continue building out our SaaS.