

Ask HN: Which tools do you use for SaaS customer management? - k__

I trying to spin up a SaaS, so I need to track customer registrations, which plans they have subscribed to and what addons they use.<p>What is your approach to this?<p>My first idea was to build something on my own, but this is a problem every SaaS provider has, so there should be something pre-made out there. Like launchrock for gathering email addresses.
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victorstanciu
Well, I'm a web developer, so I rolled my own. I built a reusable framework
for SaaS projects with just the kind of features you mention, and I've been
using it both for myself as well for freelance clients.

Basically it's a PHP framework with a lot of SaaS-specific features built in.
With each new project I implemented more and more features on it, to the point
where I can now launch a functional MVP quite rapidly.

Lately (like, this week!) I got the idea of trying to license this framework
to others, as well as sell them my web development services for the rest of
their project. To this end, I published a quick LP
([http://turbomvp.com/](http://turbomvp.com/)), which I'm now trying to
improve, because I've been told it's not really clear at all what I'm offering
:)

I haven't yet figured out the licensing model either, this is still a very
rough idea. The framework, however, is really cool.

~~~
iDemonix
I'm thinking of doing what you're doing, but with Laravel.

Let's say you have 3-4 SaaS sites all based upon your 'Core SaaS framework',
when you make a change to the core framework, how do you manage this with your
independent sites? Do you treat the independent sites as forks of the core
framework and patch changes in? All manual? Or once you've started to build on
the core framework do you simply accept that it's now an individual product
and the core never changes?

~~~
victorstanciu
Hi iDemonix,

Sorry for the late reply, I just came back from vacation.

I currently apply any updates manually, yes, I don't have an auto-update
solution in place. Furthermore, sometimes a customer will ask for some custom
feature that I can only implement by editing the actual framework, so at any
point in time each customer may be running a custom version that cannot be
auto-updated anyway.

> Or once you've started to build on the core framework do you simply accept
> that it's now an individual product and the core never changes?

Something like that, yes. I currently treat each implementation as a separate
project, so I don't worry about backwards compatibility too much when I
implement a new features. However, I am looking into changing this workflow,
since I'm not really satisfied with how updates are currently rolled out.

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davismwfl
Depending on who you use for payment services you may be able to leverage
their solution. For example Stripe has a good majority of the features you
need including subscription tracking etc. you can have every customer with a
unique id that ties back to your system and stores more detailed custom
attributes.

We kinda do this, in that we let stripe manage the subscriptions etc, we just
store all the relevant data back in our database. So if we ever had to switch
payment providers we can without losing any data or historical accuracy. But
it did really make getting running pretty fast and easy.

~~~
tixocloud
In your experience, is Stripe's subscription features good enough? When would
I ever use something like a Chargify/Recurly?

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smileysteve
RAILS: Use Devise for Login / Registration. For subscriptions there are some
good stripe gems.

[https://github.com/thefrontside/stripe-
rails](https://github.com/thefrontside/stripe-rails)
[https://github.com/plataformatec/devise](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise)

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mayyuen318
I use retain.cc for SaaS customer management.

Apart from tracking customer registration, they could even track anonymous
behaviors too.

