
Ask HN: Approach to building small SaaS products for people with min upkeep - ge96
So here&#x27;s an example problem that you can solve many ways(different stacks, services, pros cons).<p>* You want a basic interface, that can generate custom emails and you save templates. (Existing services already). Possible this does not need to be a full blown editor that has to deal with HTML security eg. contenteditable&#x2F;XSS.<p>* It has auth, SSL, storage. Pretty basic.<p>My potential approaches:<p>Goto email that delivers(not spam) is through Mailgun plus 10K&#x2F;mo free emails that&#x27;s not bad.<p>- WP as a base<p>In the past I worked at a place that used WP as a base, since it has a lot of things built into it. I&#x27;m against it because for example above it&#x27;s pretty overkill, not to mention the vulnerabilities&#x2F;too easy for a target(since so many people using it, seems like a bad reason) but particularly random plugins you can use and known vulnerabilities like xmlrpc. I also don&#x27;t keep up with it anymore regarding what changed on it.<p>But it&#x27;s an option, it works.<p>- MyERN stack(current preferred)<p>I personally would use React for this(why) well I use it daily&#x2F;like it(separate components). Backend is Node&#x2F;Express&#x2F;MySQL, auth is not bad(JWT).<p>The SSL thing, can have that for free Let&#x27;sEncrypt. Assumes you automate the 90 day renewal.<p>Hosting... I personally use VPS&#x27;s from OVH, which you could extend further if you containerized them.<p>- Basic LAMP<p>The main thing is after it&#x27;s built, how long does it last for? I can also use regular plain LAMP as well.<p>And I think a lot of it is personal choice, do you care&#x2F;how much time do you want to spend on it. Can use Firebase or other services where you don&#x27;t have to do much &quot;backend wise&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t know... it would be cool though to have random little services like this with monthly charges eg. for maintenance&#x2F;hosting&#x2F;etc... keep it running. What are your thoughts?<p>edit: you can also go super &quot;overkill&quot; too with regard to job queues, uptime guarantees, etc...
======
ge96
One problem for me is if I get a request like that(to build above). I'm like
"can you draw me a picture" lol... serious response. I'm unfortunately a "give
me a design I'll build it" sort of person at this time mostly. I mean usually
with clear enough feature definition, I can come up with a UI/UX on my own.
Other thing which I think makes sense is I ask them what exactly they want it
to do, then I can scope out the work/get an estimate on how long/much to
complete.

Anyway there are a few examples like this where I lost out on work because I'm
not a business man where I'm like "sure I can build you a car" and it's not
just a box with wheels. I gotta be like "what type of engine/motor does it
use?" "What do you think it looks like?" etc

edit: the other thing I'm bad at is I try too hard, try to show everything,
all my capabilities... that's like the feature thing, too many features.

In the past I didn't know what value is, until I had to pay taxes for being
self-employed ha. And based on my w2 rate wow, I can charge quite a bit but it
still seems too much... but I suppose it's not from an individual's
perspective rather a business perspective which has more money presumably.

