Should I move my PHP app to Django?
OK, I'm not really looking for a yes or no answer, but more help with how to think about it.
TL;DR - What do you think?
It would probably take less than 6 months profits to do this and if it turned out to work smoother, it would save me the weekly headaches of dealing with some of the small bugs that I know would be avoided.
Short background
I have a micro-SaaS I've run for 10 years now and it's still generating "take a nice vacation-level" income. I contracted most of the coding to different people over time and have plenty of technical debt. I'm building a different micro-SaaS and pretty sure I'll be using Django/HTMX/MySQL as the stack for that app. If that's a good experience, I'm thinking of moving the original app too.
Problems
- Lots of little bugs that never seem to be fully gone and which I know are costing revenue
- Old PHP Framework with not standardized code, comments or structure so when this developer goes, it will be hard for someone to step in and understand (although I could probably guide them)
- Passable Bootstrap Dashboard that needs investment, but not sure to invest in old platform
Opportunities
- Leverage Django Boilerplate license being bought for new app to bake in the basics
- It's an integration service so after initial configuration, users seldom return (think Zapier). Means integration algorithm logic shouldn't be hard to recode in new language and even launch separately than configuration front end.
Since you have already decided to use Django, Mysql for your new micro saas, it would be a good idea to migrate the existing code to a new stack. I wouldn't want work on two different tech stacks at the same time.