Ruby on Rails 8 is the ideal framework for solo founders. Here's why.

"The One Person Framework."

That's the title of a post written three years ago by DHH, the creator of Rails, to announce Rails 7. Whether Rails 7 lived up to that standard is… debatable.

But a few days ago, DHH announced the beta version of Rails 8, and now I think the debate is over. Rails 8 is the ideal framework for solo founders.

But before we take a deep dive into what Rails 8 has to offer, let's explore the current state of web development.

Web development is unnecessarily complicated

Don't just take my word for it. This is the collective opinion of thousands of people on forums such as Hacker News.

React. Vue. Front-end tooling. Hundreds of lines of boilerplate.

Several years ago, a single person could create a full-fledged web app and ship it themselves. They could "fit" the logic of that web app inside a mental model in their own head.

Try doing that now. Your "brain budget" will be exhausted.

Which brings me to my next point:

Our monkey brains have limited capacity

One of the goals of Rails, according to DHH, is to align the simplicity of the coding process with that of our limited monkey brains.

Imagine trying to fit all the intricacies of a complicated build pipeline in your head, along with hundreds of depenencies, front-end and back-end tools, databases, and more.

DHH's vision is for you to be able to hold the entire problem in your mind, along with the entire solution. To be able to compress all of the parts of the modern development experience into small units that can fit next to each other so that you can squeeze all of them into your "brain budget."

Modern web development is not heading in that direction. Instead, we've been subdividing the industry into tiny slices of expertise.

DHH doesn't take issue with this in every case. Once an app is making millions of dollars, it's reasonable to scale up the complexity of its tech stack. But this isn't how things should look in the beginning.

If you go to the Rails home page, this is actually their headline:

So without further ado, let's dive deeper into the Rails 8 features that, in my opinion, make it the perfect app for solopreneurs.

A simple way to deploy multiple apps to a single server

As solopreneurs, we want to spend as little time and energy as we can getting our web apps up and running.

And my use of the plural form of "apps" here is deliberate. We often have to take many shots on goal (i.e. build and launch multiple apps) to find one that works.

So the cost of software hosting matters. If it costs, say, $30/mo to run a given app, things can get out of control quickly. Publish ten apps and you're looking at a $300/mo bill.

Rails 8 will make it "dead simple" to run multiple Rails apps on a single server:

Rails will offer this through a free, open source library. All you'll need in order to get started is a virtual private server (VPS). Many indie hackers, especially in Europe, use Hetzner, which has some incredibly cheap plans.

Compare all of this with Laravel's Forge, which is much pricier.

You no longer need lots of RAM to run background jobs

Want to run a background job system? You need Redis. A separate process, separate dependencies. Each major dependency adds a new problem for you to hold in mind.

RAM is expensive. If you take a look at most VPS pricing pages, it usually goes this way: More RAM equals more money.

According to DHH, you no longer need RAM-based databases like Redis for things like background jobs or websocket communications.

The reason: SSDs (solid-state drives) are becoming incredibly fast and provide "good enough" performance to replace RAM-based databases.

Rails 8 introduces a few new database-backed adapters called "Solid":

• Solid Cable: for Websocket communications. Solid Cable gets 50% of the performance vs. a RAM-based database, which is good enough for the vast majority of web apps.

• Solid Cache: for Cache storage

• Solid Queue: for running jobs. You can choose to run these jobs as a process inside your main server process, which further simplifies things. According to DHH, his email client Hey.com currently runs 20 million jobs per day with Solid Queue.

All of these adapters run on top of SQLite, which is a simple file. No process involved. No need to set up a database and learn it inside and out.

Rails 8 has built-in authentication and a built-in web server

You no longer need to use a third-party library like Devise to implement authentication for your web app.

Rails now supports built-in authentication (something that Django/Laravel supported long ago).

Rails also has Thruster: a built-in web server. So no need for Nginx.

Rails is an 80/20 framework

DHH claims that all of these features have given Rails a "compression factor of 6," meaning they have compressed the level of complexity needed to deploy to production by a factor of 6.

So you can now deploy two or three full-fledged web apps in the time it would take you to deploy just one on many other modern stacks. Pretty incredible.

What's fascinating is how dedicated the Rails team is to the 80/20 principle.

For example, in DHH's Rails 8 talk, he announced "Active Record Search," an 80/20 way to do full-text search. Most developers, he observed, need only a small percentage of the overall functionality for most of the things they want.

All of these ideas might seem radical to someone who's on the "cutting edge" of web dev. But they make sense to me as an indie hacker.

What I want is a quick way to start a project and keep going to a point where I reach millions of MRR. Once I reach millions, I can afford to hire a team to complexify my stack.