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10 Comments

RoR SaaS boilerplate app. Market need?

I've been working on XLPLAN for a year now and the hardest part for me was NOT TO make the functionality of the app, but to make it SaaS [organisations can have many members; organisation is billed 🏘️].

🤔Now I'm thinking that creating a product from the SaaS-part can save a lot of developers significant time ➡️➡️

Do you think there can be a market need in a Ruby on Rails SaaS boilerplate like this? Any ideas on how I can validate it?

Thank you!

  1. 3

    I run a Rails SaaS starter kit since December 2018. Started as something really small, but has gained quite some traction (enough to bring someone in part- time recently while I focus on my other products). I don't (and won't) consider it a business on it's own, but it could help you kickstart a suite of other tools (that can be a business as a whole).

    So yes, there's a market need. If you should go down that road depends on your longer term plans.

    1. 1

      Cool! Can you share a link to your starter kit?

  2. 2

    I run a Javascript boilerplate (https://usegravity.app) and have 235 customers, so there's definitely a market for it.

    However, I had first-mover advantage with Javascript, you have some heavy competition from Bullettrain & Railskits which are both built in Rails. The big challenge will be in figuring out how to position yourself against these two kits.

  3. 2

    You an also check out https://bullettrain.co/ as another example of this being done. This is similar to Jumpstart Rails that someone mentioned already.

  4. 2

    In this case it's simple. Just look at the success of new entrants like Jumpstart Rails.

    You can also hear about Chris's experience building it on his Business Time podcast.

  5. 2

    It would be interesting to see. Check out Laravel Spark

    1. 1

      Laravel Spark is really feature-packed! Looks awesome

  6. 2

    Can you elaborate on what it would include that currently available open source tools do not provide? I build everything in Rails so I could be interested in this but I also am pretty satisfied with the plethora of gems available for me to assemble my perfect stack.

    1. 1

      there are 3 OK-ish gems for multitenancy:

      • apartment (multiple db)
      • acts_as_tenant (1 db, very basic)
      • milia (1db, lots of functions inbuilt but not so flexible)

      I've tried using all of them and at a point had a very hard migration from from milia to acts_as_tenant because of increased flexibility.

      And turning a set of gems into a working SaaS app takes a lot of time and consideration.

      Anyway, a the SaaS boilerplate would looks something like:
      Basics:
      User can create many Tenants.
      Tenant can have many Members.
      Members can or can't have a User account.
      Members with User accounts have role-based access to a Tenant.

      SaaS revenue block:
      Tenant has a Pricing Plan
      Tenant can be billed based on one or many Pricing parameters (Modular pricing)
      Invoicing
      Stripe
      Subscription management

      Additional:
      Language support, Time zone support

  7. 1

    Ok, so I've created my own boilerplate (alternative to Jumpstart and Bullettrain) and a 175-video course

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