Shipped my biggest release since launch
by Cory ZueAfter literally months of coding I've finally shipped the biggest release to Pegasus since the project has started - the addition of Stripe Subscriptions for your app. This represents the culmination of hundreds of hours of work, including building out an entire subscription tier on another one of my apps (Place Card Me) that I did almost entirely as a learning exercise to help inform the design of this feature.
Now with a clean install, a bit of config in Stripe, and a few one-line commands, it's possible to set up subscription billing in under 10 minutes. It was pretty difficult to decide what level of customization and flexibility to support, versus making it dead-simple, but I'm pleased with where I ended up. And I've already gotten some really positive feedback on the feature from some existing and new Pegasus customers which is validating.
Honestly, with this release Pegasus finally feels like a compete, first-class product. I rode that whole "if you're not ashamed of your product, you launched too early" advice for the better part of a year. But Pegasus is finally something I am not ashamed of. Hooray!
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i'm super-psyched to see you're still working on this.
at first i checked out the new subscription/stripe functionality and was like, "That's it?"
but i see now it was a ton of work. terrible/boring work, too, imo, so ++good.
i hope to never code again so i'm interested in Pegasus to be able to have someone else quickly prototype new projects for me.
i would love to see more example apps -- like the 'Employees' object lifecycle app. I don't have a specific idea in mind, but maybe a short video on...."ok, here's your base install, now we're going to build the Employees CRUD."
And, that's a heck of a name for an app -- 'Object Lifecycle'. I get it, but....I might go with "CRUD 'Employee' App". 'Object Lifecycle' makes it sound like I'm worrying about the intricacies of memory management and/or/with React/js/python.
And I'm not sure how to think about that example app -- is that the correct way to do things in Pegasus? Is there a correct or correct-ish way? I personally tend to dig both SPAs and non-SPAs for their particular use cases.
and i had a difficult-ish time finding this -- i kept looking for "commercial python framework (like laravel spark)" and things like that (and I knew about Pegasus from reading IH a few months ago).
i'm also trying to decide between Pegasus and Laravel Spark.
but, good job, happy to see it moving forward.
cheers!
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Thanks for the support and feedback, @atlrox!
at first i checked out the new subscription/stripe functionality and was like, "That's it?"
Out of curiosity, what else were you expecting? Would be good to know for a future release...
i hope to never code again so i'm interested in Pegasus to be able to have someone else quickly prototype new projects for me.
If you hope to never code again, you might want to go with Webflow or another no code tool ;)
And, that's a heck of a name for an app -- 'Object Lifecycle'. I get it, but....I might go with "CRUD 'Employee' App". 'Object Lifecycle' makes it sound like I'm worrying about the intricacies of memory management and/or/with React/js/python.
Good feedback! I'll think on this. It actually used to be CRUD but people didn't like that either. Naming things is hard...
And I'm not sure how to think about that example app -- is that the correct way to do things in Pegasus? Is there a correct or correct-ish way? I personally tend to dig both SPAs and non-SPAs for their particular use cases.
Yeah, same. Pegasus is actually designed for both cases. After I finish my Django-Stripe integration guide, the next content marketing piece is going to be an opinionated treatise on the various ways to do modern front-end + Django, but the TL;DR is to mix in both SPA concepts where you need them, and do boring old normal stuff when you don't, which is how Pegasus works.
and i had a difficult-ish time finding this -- i kept looking for "commercial python framework (like laravel spark)" and things like that (and I knew about Pegasus from reading IH a few months ago).
Good to know! I haven't done much SEO or marketing, so hopefully this improves over time as I'm now shifting my focus there since I think the product is "good enough"...
i'm also trying to decide between Pegasus and Laravel Spark.
Honestly, by far the most important aspect of this decision will be whether you want to work in Django or Laravel. Both Pegasus and Spark will jump start you and save you a huge amount of time up front, but if you're successful then the overwhelming amount of work will still be everything that happens after you get going. So I'd optimize for the underlying technology and worry less about comparing the two e.g. on a feature-basis. Just my two cents.
thanks again for the support and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or feedback!
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Out of curiosity, what else were you expecting? Would be good to know for a future release...
nothing I could think of -- just 'more'.
but i figured out part of my confusion -- the home page makes it seem like Pegasus is just 'User Management, Teams, and Subscriptions' -- nothing else.
because of the way the page is laid out.
i.e. there is not a section called 'Features/Benefits' with a list of the 20 or however many things I'm paying my $200+ for -- it looks like just those first three things.
to me, it did, anyways.
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Thanks, that makes sense. Will think about ways to position it better!
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Hi Cory,
Congrats on building such an awesome product in saas Pegasus. I have a couple of questions (perhaps silly). Would be great if you could help answer them.
- Does Pegasus have any support for multi-tenancy ? If so could you briefly share how is multi-tenancy supported.
2.Are there any tracking codes in Pegasus ? For maybe licensing reasons etc. Or is the product completely independent once purchased.
- What kind of charts are natively supported in Pegasus, also if you could share the charting library that is used.
Thanks & Best Regards,
Deepu-
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Hey Deepu,
No such thing as a silly question! ;)
- Does Pegasus have any support for multi-tenancy ? If so could you briefly share how is multi-tenancy supported.
Yes. Kind of. How I describe it is that Pegasus ships with the bones for multi-tenancy, but you still have to use those to build out your app. The architecture uses a single site-wide database and relies on foreign keys and application logic to manage multi-tenancy. It also ships with utility functions and patterns for how to implement multi-tenancy in your app layer for both a user and team-based app.
I'm aware of more enterprisey set ups, but find this model is great for 90+ percent of projects as it is a good balance of secure but also easy to set up, manage, and deploy.
2.Are there any tracking codes in Pegasus ? For maybe licensing reasons etc. Or is the product completely independent once purchased.
No, the licensing set up relies on an honor system and there are not currently any tracking or "phone home" checks on licenses.
- What kind of charts are natively supported in Pegasus, also if you could share the charting library that is used.
Just a basic pie chart and bar chart at the moment using c3.js. Though if there are any specific charts or libraries you're interested in I'd love to hear what they are so I can expand on that in a future release!
cheers,
Cory-
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Hey Cory,
Many thanks for the detailed explanations. It is a really cool product. Especially love the support background tasks in celery and its progress reporting in the front end.
I truly appreciate the effort that would have gone into making this,
however I think the price might be bit too steep for potential users. Perhaps the current price of 1 website would be ok for unlimited sites, or same price as now but with more features would be great.By more features I mean:
-some kind of base to setup other multi-tenancy options as well , like different subdomains and linked schema for each teams.
-multiple styling options/templates for UI and landing page.
-support for quick CRUD generation involving multiple models.
-more builtin charting options.I know all of these could be coded on top of the base template rather easily , but it would be great if the template can have them pre-baked :)
Lastly , I am a total noob in web development, although I have a technology and developer background its in old clunky enterprise applications involving technologies which would now be considered "legacy" .So please excuse me if whatever I have said above doesn't make sense or is total crap :)
Best Regards,
Deepu-
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Hi Deepu,
Thanks for the feedback!
What you said definitely makes sense, although I don't necessarily agree with all of it. ;)
Here's another way of looking at it:
To get to the starting position that Pegasus provides you would require, in all honesty, probably 40-80 hours of time from an experienced developer. Maybe more. But let's call it 60.
At a typical rate for an experienced developer, say $100/hour, that means the value you are getting is $6,000. For just $200 ($300 starting next month).
Obviously if you can code and have the time (or prefer to learn by doing it yourself) then this value proposition doesn't make sense but for many people Pegasus is actually a steal!
That said I am working on some of the features you mentioned - and Pegasus is getting better and better with every release!
cheers,
Cory-
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Hey Cory,
I think I agree with you, your explanation makes sense. Being a novice in web development field , my judgement of the effort and complexity of building something like that from scratch cannot be accurate. Thanks for clarifying that.
Am eagerly following the developments of Pegasus while parallely building up my skills to be able to make good use it some day :).Cheers and have a nice weekend,
Deepu
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