
Ask HN: What are your biggest time savers when building a SaaS? - philtar
What are some things you do when building a SaaS that save a ton of time?<p>Some that I can name:<p>* Use a web framework<p>* Customize a template instead of building from scratch (wrap bootstrap)<p>* outsource your billing (zuroa, chargify, etc.)<p>What are some tricks you can use to go from idea to product in two weeks?
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caleblloyd
\- Outsource authentication. Use Okta, Auth0, or the likes. Especially cheap
for Enterprise SaaS apps where there will not be a lot of users.

\- Use a first-party, well-known framework for the frontend. create-react-app,
vue-cli, etc. They work well and have supported upgrade paths

\- Setup a CI/CD pipeline and testing site early. This may be an upfront
investment, but it will allow you to quickly iterate, have something to
demonstrate, and easily launch your prod site when you're ready

\- Other things I personally like are UI Framework for the frontend, ORM with
migration support for the Backend, and Swagger with automatic client library
generation. There's arguments for and against each of these but they help me
devolop faster

~~~
nodesocket
I agree writing login, forgot password, two-factor auth, change password is a
huge time suck. My fear of using a 3rd party such as Auth0 for such a critical
part of your application is vendor dependency. I've been bitten badly by 3rd
party companies shutting down, being acquired, or abandoned.

~~~
ISO-morphism
I hate to advocate for it, but AWS Cognito is _laughably cheap_ and certainly
not going anywhere. Big downside is that there isn't a way to export; you'd
have to list all usernames and have every user reset their password. Not
really helping with vendor dependency, unfortunately.

It takes a lot of sorting through terrible docs to understand, but user pools
are OpenID Connect compliant. You get canned login/mfa/forgot ui's out of the
box for every platform, and it's _so cheap_.

50k MAU with Cognito: free. [1]

50k MAU with Auth0: $850/mo. [2]

[1]
[https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/)

[2] [https://auth0.com/pricing](https://auth0.com/pricing)

EDIT: Thinking about this post a bit, it doesn't really address your key
concern of vendor lock-in and feels like a shill. My immediate gut reaction
was "who cares if you're locked in, no way can you beat the price," and that
isn't very constructive. I know on an intellectual level that history has
taught us a lot of things about monopolies and entrenched players, but
emotionally the visible price tag elicits a strong response. Maybe someday
Teddy Roosevelt will rise from his grave and save us all.

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1ba9115454
* Use an OPINIONATED framework.

* Generate your pages server side. client side frameworks add a ton of complexity for no benefit.

* Deploy to Heroku.

* Outsource your development if you can afford to.

* Concentrate on your landing page and blog. This is how customers will find you.

* Write system tests. chrome driver or whatever your framework supports.

~~~
slow_donkey
I know a lot of people on HN say server rendered first, but imo the difference
in speed and complexity is minimal if you already know Vue/react/angular.

Really the biggest benefit of server rendered is keeping everything as a
monolith but if you have to support mobile then you need to expose an API
anyways

~~~
romanovcode
Pre-rendering techniques on all SPA is poor and will introduce a lot of
complexity.

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Cypher
don't be afraid to tell the client no you can't support something.

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PerfectElement
Use the stack you are most proficient in, unless you are building a SaaS in
order to teach yourself a new language/framework.

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billconan
vue is really a time saver for me. if I need to write an internal tool, I'd
even use a vue based ui framework, like
[https://www.iviewui.com/](https://www.iviewui.com/)

