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Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by fxtentacle on Monday November 23, 2020 @10:46AM (#25187940)
Here's my self-serving advice for every one-man SaaS:

Use Heroku.

It's super easy to get started. And when you reach $2000+ in monthly bills, hire me to move things over onto dedicated or EC2 so that you'll get 10x that performance for the same price.

As for the actual language, I think PostgreSQL + Ruby Backend + JS Frontend is still the easiest way to get started.

All those great architectural ideas don't matter much until you have your first $5k monthly in reliable revenue. And by then, you'll have a completely different perspective than what you think you need now.

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by blackrock on Monday November 23, 2020 @09:01PM (#25194451)
Something doesn’t make sense here.

Say, you’re a business, and want to set up your own e-commerce site. Whether it makes money immediately or not, is not a concern, as the business will pay for it, and absorb the initial loss. And the development costs to build the site are already in the $50,000+ range.

So with all this upfront expense, why don’t the business just go with EC2?

Unless this is for some silly hobby website of yours, that you have no clue will make any money or not. Then in this case, maybe your suggestion is valid.

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by Rastonbury on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @01:56AM (#25196021)
They start the comment saying its targeted at one man SaaS. Even e-commerce, there are many who will not drop 50k on development and just start with shopify.
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by aerovistae on Monday November 23, 2020 @04:36PM (#25192228)
Okay, this thread is making me nervous about Heroku. I'm building a web app that runs on it and I clearly have not given the pricing scaling as much thought as I apparently need to.

My site is a firebase powered SPA, so the only thing Heroku has to handle is the initial pageload....I would think that the standard 1x dyno would be sufficient for that....which is not very expensive...

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by bpicolo on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:26PM (#25193715)
If it's just a static site, use Netlify.
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by thesandlord on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:09PM (#25195189)
If you are already using Firebase, why not use Firebase Hosting or Firebase Functions?
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by taffer on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:05AM (#25188184)
> PostgreSQL + Ruby Backend + JS Frontend is still the easiest way to get started.

With JS, do you mean React or jquery or literally JavaScripting the DOM?

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by fxtentacle on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:26AM (#25188414)
I meant some sort of JavaScript framework. I'd say that part mostly depends on personal preference. I'm quite happy with Angular, but I've also had lots of smaller one-off pages where I used jQuery.
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by xyst on Monday November 23, 2020 @05:50PM (#25192876)
if you truly want to save some $$$, host it on your residential line and proxy the requests through an external load balancer.

could also rope your friends/family into it if you want your app to be "distributed", might require a lot of work though especially if they are not very technology oriented.

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by tensor on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:26AM (#25188420)
I'd actually suggest PostgreSQL + Hasura + React with Ant Design or Material UI
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by fxtentacle on Monday November 23, 2020 @12:27PM (#25189154)
For many newcomers starting out, the Rails CRUD generators are good enough to generate their entire admin area. And Rails comes with sane security defaults.

I agree that GraphQL + React will be pretty and work well. But for one-man start-ups, the focus is usually on "looks good enough and kinda works".

So I believe I'd go with Bootstrap & Glyphicons, just to get results faster.

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by cpursley on Monday November 23, 2020 @01:05PM (#25189631)
Hasura outperforms Rails by an order of magnitude in addition to being faster to develop with. Supabase also looks really nice.
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by armatav on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:34AM (#25188509)
This man knows the way.

I use this stack and I'm pretty sure I could pump out any SaaS business in about two weeks with it. Host on Heroku, use whatever analytics system you want.

Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by xu3u32 on Monday November 23, 2020 @03:43PM (#25191574)
How hard is CORS set up with dedicated frontend/backend? I'm running into this with Django REST and VueJS. Or do you just host both using Heroku?
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by cbdumas on Monday November 23, 2020 @06:53PM (#25193426)
I'm not the person you asked but I have my frontend hosted separately from the Heroku backend. CORS was a bit of a pain at first, mostly because I had never had to deal with it before, but after initial setup I never think about it.
Re:The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS by justingreet on Monday November 23, 2020 @10:55PM (#25195125)
We use Django REST and an angular frontend. Django is hosted on heroku, and angular is hosted on netlify. Netlify makes it super easy to proxy API requests from the front-end to our API backend.