
Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end - m1guelpf
https://sitesauce.app
======
neya
I love this site. It's truly impressive for any solo founder, regardless of
the age, let along an 18 year old. Yeah, you kind of rely on the generosity of
your vendor (Vercel, in this case), but that's really the only option if you
want to keep costs low.

I hated Wordpress so much so that I wrote my own CMS + static site generator
using a different approach and used it for clients who run sites with 3
million+ visitors a month currently. Once we made that move, we realized how
horribly slow was Wordpress even on the best hardware thrown at it. Our costs
dropped down to 1/10th of what we used to spend as well purely in terms of
hardware. I can easily believe that static sites are the future.

I think this space has a lot of room for new players and definitely worth to
keep a watch on. All the best. Hope you see success.

Neya

~~~
zapt02
This is a cute story, but what was -actual- the cost (time, monetary and
opportunity) in building your own CMS instead of applying basic performance
tweaks to an off the shelf system?

~~~
kfk
Well I had to do our corporate team site and got so frustrated with SharePoint
that I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files. It was a
couple of days of work. It runs behind nginx and automatically updated on
GitHub commit of new content. Bootstrap is very well documented and you can
use rst directives for “widgets”. I am in the process of moving to markdown +
yaml now to make writing content even easier.

~~~
dewey
Why not just use any other static site generator like Hugo instead of re-
inventing it?

~~~
ipieter
I can answer that, since I also made a small static site generator from
scratch in python.

I was using another static site generator (Hexo), but at some point I wanted
to change some things and add some custom html to my posts. Since the
documentation was ... well ... minimalistic on some aspects, I also spent some
time looking at the source code. But at that point I was really wondering what
benefit I still had from using that generator.

In the end, all a static site generator does is collecting some markdown or
RST files, converting them to html and putting that into a template html file.
And generating some lists (index page, RSS, ...) and some metadata for SEO. So
it took me a single Saturday to make a working static site generator and now I
can do anything I want without looking up documentation or source code, since
it's my own dumpster fire :-)

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bgdam
Wow, I've considered building this exact same app for about 11 years now, but
I never did it because I thought there would never be a large enough market to
make it successful.

Kudos to you for actually building and launching! Hope you have a lot of
success and prove me wrong about the market size.

EDIT: After going through the site and your video, it appears as though you
crawl the dynamic site, and generate static pages out of it. It's not really
clear if you support sites that render on the client side. Do you?

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hnal943
...any backend that is a content-heavy website? Or are they somehow also
abstracting away the application logic?

How is this different from a CDN cache?

~~~
xwdv
The way it abstracts application logic is by finding out what parts of your
site can be immutable functions, then produces all the variations of static
content for each possible input.

~~~
hnal943
Seems like static site generation for non-programmers, maybe.

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joshdance
I read this as 'generate a static website for any backyard' and got excited
for some reason. :) gardening?

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hashamali
This is extremely impressive for an 18 year old, well done!

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ollerac
I think you mean extremely impressive for any solo founder, period.

~~~
temporama1
I think you mean extremely impressive for any human, period.

~~~
grafs50
Making it even more impressive for someone who is all 3 ;)

~~~
maddydugar
Making it even more impressive, that he has already contributed to 500 open-
source projects!
[https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/m1guelpf)

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kevmo314
Wow this is pretty cool! Seems like a great tool to throw onto an existing
CMS, allowing clients to retain the flexibility of editing their website
directly.

Does this deal with/forward dynamic content on the same domain? Or do admin
panels, etc have to be hosted on a separate subdomain?

EDIT: Wow, Miguel is even completely transparent
([https://sitesauce.app/open](https://sitesauce.app/open)) with his revenue
and costs. That's incredibly inspiring to see from an 18 year old.

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madsbuch
Vercel has a 16000 files limit (That we hit). How do you handle big sites?

Edit: This is not a problem for a lot of pages. But to me that is a deal
breaker to use Vercel for any medium or large sized projects.

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WordSkill
Requiring a credit card before any functionality is enabled breaks the
WordPress.org plugin directory guidelines.

To be compliant, the 7-day free trial should be possible without having to
provide credit card details.

That is, in any case, best practice, unless profiting from people who forget
to cancel is an important part of your business plan.

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jetti
Let me start off by saying good job on launching. Is there an ability to stop
automatic deployments on change and instead allow for manual deployments?
Also, I am a bit confused about the hosting. On your landing page you say:

"Sitesauce hosts your static sites on Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering
unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."

Then in your Terms of Service you say:

"You agree that Sitesauce is not responsible for any additional fees charged
to your credit card by third-party server providers such as Vercel."

How does the hosting work? Do I sign up with Sitesauce and also sign up for
Vercel? If that is the case, would I be able to pick a different host if I
wanted? If it isn't the case and Sitesauce handles the backend process of
creating an account on Vercel is it paid for by using my credit card and you
pass that info to Vercel?

~~~
m1guelpf
Sitesauce allows you to login with your Vercel account once you create an
account with us. Once you've done that, we use their API to set everything we
need up.

~~~
jetti
In that case perhaps the wording on the front page should be:

"Sitesauce publishes your static sites to Vercel (formerly ZEIT), offering
unlimited bandwidth and their world-class CDN for no additional cost."

That makes it clear that you aren't the one hosting and that it is actually
Vercel. My initial understanding was that you would pull my data and host it
yourself using Vercel as your host. Since you are using the host's API do you
have any plans to integrate with other hosts, such as AWS?

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oefrha
Landing page feedback: the backend that keeps changing (“like X-powered
websites”) could cause the whole page to jump. This is very annoying on narrow
viewports (e.g. mobile), especially when I’m reading text, for instance the
FAQ.

~~~
quickthrower2
And super nitpick but the font used connects s and t and it really looks out
of place to me.

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treebornfrog
I like it, will have to try this on my wp site.

Thank you for creating this. It's a great product, something I'd happily pay
$20 for.

I think you should perhaps market this to the SEO community. They care tons
about pagespeed. Also, set up an affiliate program.

All the best!

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eggsthedev
Wow, good job! As a fellow teenager, it really encourages me that it's
possible to launch something successfully without making it your full-time job
:)

~~~
quickthrower2
There is absolutely no reason a teenager can’t nail these sorts of projects.
And often being young has some big advantages in terms of not having got too
comfortable with a salaried job and knowing what the next generation wants.

My advice (teenager or not) is join online communities like indie hackers and
get all the help because anyone doing this at any age needs to learn diverse
skills, it’s not just about having an idea and coding.

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lihaciudaniel
Because of losing my backups of my WordPress website this is a great solution
I can just have a static website for my clients

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lwhalen
How does it play with Squarespace sites? I didn't see that mentioned as one of
their supported back-ends.

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jaywalk
How can $20/month flat pricing realistically work? What if I've got a content-
heavy site that gets a lot of traffic? Will I get hit with a surprise bill, or
will you eat the costs and just cut me off?

It's a great idea for a service, but the pricing just seems too simplistic.

~~~
m1guelpf
The hosting is managed by Vercel, who recently announced unlimited bandwidth
on their free plan [1]

[1]: [https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-
pricing](https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing)

~~~
nkozyra
Yikes.

So the bigger question then is what happens when they change this? Or go away.
Also, have you seen what "Additionally, different hard limits apply for each
plan." means on their pricing page[1]? Domain limits, maximum files, etc? What
those might mean when you scale beyond expectation?

I don't mean to discourage. But big vendors pull the rug out from under people
all the time, sometimes ruining a business because there's no viable
alternative.

Make sure your eggs can be put in different baskets if need be.

[1]
[https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits](https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/limits)

~~~
jaywalk
Yeah, that's almost worse. It means Sitesauce is relying on the generosity of
their vendor for their business model to work.

~~~
quickthrower2
Well they could also connect to upload to s3, netlify, github pages, GitLab
pages, to name the free or pretty cheap static hosts I can think of!

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artificial
I've browsed the site and didn't see how are forms handled?

~~~
js2
Bottom of the front page:

> Sitesauce recommends the use of JAMstack-friendly alternatives to this
> services. For example, you could move your contact forms to StaticKit or
> your comments to Commento.

> However, there are times where the only option is to rely on your backend.
> For this, you can configure Sitesauce to proxy certain endpoints to your
> backend. You can also use this if you need to fetch some data from your
> backend via AJAX.

~~~
artificial
Thank you! All I could think about was contact forms and other opportunities
intakes. Missed that.

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WordSkill
Site design is a direct rip from
[https://www.designjoy.co/](https://www.designjoy.co/)

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abinaya_rl
This is looking great, I'm wondering if you folks can support webflow.com
exports?

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tomstoms
Interesting product! But I find the font really annoying especially the st
ligature.

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code_duck
>Without access to your backend, there's no way for anyone to steal sensitive
data or deface your website.

No way? At all? Why could they not deface or alter the static version? Of
course there's a lot less attack surface but that doesn't mean it's
invulnerable.

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winrid
Nice UI, value prop, and pricing. Well done!

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npv789
this is game changer

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arkitaip
There is hope for this industry when a 18-yo creates such an amazing
conversion centric landing page. Well done, m1guelpf.

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racket
This costs $20/month, what happens when someone releases an open source
version that essentially does the same thing but for free?

~~~
eyelidlessness
Some people will use the open source tool and other people will gladly pay
money to have someone else manage it for them. Pretty much the same as any
service that provides a (real or perceived) value and has open source
alternatives.

