Saasify

It's our 4th week on the Pioneer platform, we're fully bootstrapped, and we just reached #5 on the Global leaderboard.

Week 0: Unranked
Week 1: Unranked
Week 2: #40 in US East
Week 3: #30 Globally
Week 4: #5 Globally

I've really enjoyed the process so far, especially giving & receiving feedback from other founders and indie hackers. 💯

I've definitely noticed a few familiar IH names on Pioneer. 👋

If anyone has questions about the process (so far) or wants specific advice, feel free to ask & I'll try to help.

Cheers,
-- Travis

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find an email from Google that our daily page clicks from Google Search results have increased 1000% over the past week!

I've also seen a similar uptick in signups and demos scheduled -- my calendar is booked solid for the next 2 weeks which is crazy.

This is just the start of things for Saasify and we have a long ways to go to accomplish the goals we set out to achieve, but it's great to see the idea start resonating with people en masse.

Strings are awesome.

But sometimes you wish they were padded to the left.

So our team decided to put years of computer science research into releasing a revolutionary machine learning-based API that blends the latest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based string manipulation. We employed agile methodologies to ensure the highest quality assurance SLAs so all of our APIs synergize with the needs of our customers.

And at the end of the day, we call this amazing product Left Pad, brought to you just in time for April. 😄

A few notes:

• This is a live product that's real kinda in that it actually works as advertised.
• Any proceeds will be donated to open source projects on Open Collective.

Our team at Saasify makes it really easy to launch real SaaS products like this one in minutes, though hopefully you'll put a little more effort into your unique value proposition 😂

We sincerely hope this product launch brings just a bit of much needed laughter into the world during these stressful times.

Check out https://saasify.sh to learn more. 💯

We're excited to launch our first real marketing site and would love any feedback the IndieHackers community may have. 😄

Here's a bit about what we're working on and why.

Saasify is the easiest way to launch your own SaaS business.

We're currently focused on making it easy for developers to monetize their APIs, and in the future we'll be gradually adding support for more SaaS verticals.

Here's how it works.

You give us a description of your API (your product's core functionality) and from there, Saasify generates a full, customizable SaaS product.

This including support for billing, subscriptions, user accounts, docs, and a polished marketing site -- everything you would need to start validating a SaaS idea with real customers.

We do all of this so you can focus on what actually matters: your product and your customers.

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This represents a pretty substantial pivot in terms of our value proposition and messaging. We were previously focused on OSS sustainability and launching SaaS on top of serverless functions, two aspects of our platform which just weren't resonating with developers.

We'll definitely still be helping OSS authors to monetize their work (always for free!), but this will no longer be a core part of our marketing messaging.

The other main pivot is to support any externally-hosted API as opposed to having to host serverless functions with Saasify. This dramatically simplifies the integration process and greatly expands the types of use cases for more complicated APIs that we're able to Saasify.

It's also a very important part of the feedback process as we've found that most indie devs who are interested in monetizing their side projects want to own their own tech stacks. So regardless of if you're a Ruby on Rails developers, a Python developer, a Java dev, JS dev, etc, or if you prefer to host on Heroku or AWS, or Digital Ocean, we support all these use cases -- you just give us a description of your externally hosted API's endpoints and Saasify generates everything from there. 💪

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You can think of Saasify as the Shopify for SaaS.

Our goal is to unlock the full potential of indie makers by reducing the friction it takes to go from idea to selling a SaaS product as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We see so many exciting products fail to launch or gain traction because their makers waste too much time on SaaS boilerplate.

This is a huge pain point for developers that we've run into ourselves, and it's one that our team is uniquely positioned and excited to solve.

Our mission is to make it easier to launch SaaS businesses.

And I'm proud to say that today marks an important milestone towards that goal.

SaaS isn't SaaS without strong support for subscription billing and we're confident that modeling Saasify's billing model off of Stripe's will have a lot of long-term benefits.

One of the most requested feature requests we've received is support for more flexible billing models that represent more common pricing scenarios, and today we're excited to launch this publicly.

With this change, our billing models reflect Stripe's subscription billing models and features much more closely. 💪

And the best part is that the majority of this work is open source!

Some example features include:

• Support for more than 2 pricing plans
• Support for non-metered billing plans
• Support for tiered billing models
• Custom features on a per-plan basis
• Custom rate limits and general config of services on a per-plan basis
• Saasify services are now aware of the plan users are calling with (so you can, for instance, have a free plan that includes watermarks on image results)

Examples

Example of 3 pricing plans with rate limits, metered billing, and custom features.

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Example of 3 pricing plans with rate limiting and metered billing disabled

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And here's the default billing model if you don't specify one. It combines a base price of $0.99 per month with metered billing to pay a small amount per request.

Release Notes 🚀

As far as testing goes, here's what i've done so far:

Automated

• ran our prod e2e tests
• ran all of our unit tests

Manual

• subscribing to imagemin, making some authenticated api calls, ensuring their usage is being tracked.
• vetted puppet master pricing (some minor okta-related css issues in a few places).
• made sure my existing subscription to synopsis was still recognized and handled properly.

Next Steps

Please let us know if you run into any unexpected issues across your deployments especially in the next few days.

Note that previous deployments will continue to work as-is (the upgrade is backwards-compatible).

If you want to redeploy a project, however, you will need to update your saasify.json pricing config to the new format.

The CLI will warn you about this. For more info, visiit https://saasify.sh/#/pricing and https://saasify.sh/#/configuration.

Thanks!

I’m a software engineer through and through.

I’m also trying to do the whole indie entrepreneur thing.

And recently I've started to really appreciate just how important marketing is to building a real business.

After spending a lot of time leveling up on the marketing & strategy side of things, I wanted to share some of the best resources I've found for developers like myself who are also learning to bootstrap, market, and sell their own indie SaaS products.

I figured that other IndieHackers would also find this stuff extremely relevant, so if you're also bootstrapping your own indie SaaS business, check it out and let me know what you think. 🔥

And lastly, what other resources have you found the most useful for leveling up your SaaS game??

Thanks! 🙏

https://blog.saasify.sh/indie-saas-resources

Really excited to continue launching polished SaaS APIs on top of Saasify.

Today, we're launching WordCloud, a simple API to create attractive preview images from any text or webpage.

As per Saasify's core mission, 80% of all revenue from this API will be set aside for the original OSS developers behind the stylecloud and wordcloud projects!

This API is surprisingly fun to play around with -- just be sure to sign up once you start hitting the rate limits since it's so affordable haha 😆

Today, we're excited to be launching synopsis, a SaaS API that allows you to easily extract and summarize the main content from any webpage or article!

Check it out if you're into that sort of thing.

Our team is working really hard to meet our aggressive goal of launching one solid SaaS product a week over the next two months!