The goal of the repository is to outline the best products and practices to use when building SaaS products. The target demographic is makers, early-stage founders, engineers and anyone else making in the making SaaS products for the web. This is a work in progress based on the experiences of real makers. The content is meant to act as a template/handbook on how to launch a SaaS product from both a technical and operational standpoint. It will cover topics like technical stack, hosting, email providers, payment providers, customer service solutions, terms of service generation, etc.
These days many products both bootstapped and funded are an aggreataion of many of products and services. The build vs. buy mentality doesn't exist as much when building SaaS because most things you can buy at an affordable price that will scale with your platform. This guide helps you choose what to buy and in some rare instances, when you should build your own.
It is important to be intentional about your decisions when launching a SaaS product. You want to think ahead about what your goals are and use those to steer your decisions. You need to be efficient and conscious in order to make sure you are always working towards those goals.
The goal of this guide is to help you create a a reliable and easily managable product that is low in cost and secure for your users.
Everything that is recommended in this guide is taking into account that goal based on 3 core criteria that are important things to optimize when building your SaaS product:
- Price - The guide will look for solutions that are affordable. When launching a SaaS product it is important to keep the burn low.
- Ease of integration and management - When thinking about launching a product I think about having the least time to integrate and how much time it will take to manage after the launch. This guide will optimize for both while not losing out on performance and/or reliability.
- Security and data privacy - This is a category that a lot sadly dismiss but this guide will focus on it. While the price is important we do not want our users' data to be sold or have the risk of being leaked so using services that care about data compliance and security is important.
- Payments
- Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
- Coding Frameworks
- No-code
- Hosting
- Databases
- Authentication
Payments are one of the easier sections because there is a clear winner; Stripe. Stripe is a perfect solution for accepting payments. With Stripe you can accept all major credit cards, ACH (bank transfers), and many other international payment types. You can set up an account for free without an incorporation. They've integrated services like Stripe Billing to managing your reoccurring transactions, Stripe Connect to manage payouts to customers (mainly used for marketplaces) and Stripe Checkout to help your customers enter/update their payment details without you having to build any UI.
- Pricing: Stripe is free to set up and you only pay a portion of each transaction. Credit card payments are
2.9% + C$0.30and ACH payments are$0.80% (up to $5). - Ease of integration and management: Stripe has built one of the most well known APIs. It is extremely easy to set up and use. The integration using the Stripe Checkout experience with Stipe billing can be done in a few hours. This makes Stripe the ultimate solution for quick setup and easy management.
- Security and data privacy: Stripe has a clear privacy policy that outlines the data they store and how they store it.
- Extras: Stripe has built Radar which is a fraud detection system that will check attributes of each transaction and spit out a score based on how likely it is to be a fraudulent payment. You can set up rules to auto decline and review payments that may be risky. It costs $0.02/transaction and it very worth it, especially when your transaction volume gets high. Another awesome part of Stripe is Atlas which is a program to turn your project into a company. They will set up your legal entity, and the company structure. This is a great product to simplify the process of moving from a project to a company.
- Braintree - Braintree is a competitor to Stripe, it is a PayPal company and has a lot of similar functionality. Braintree has a few unique features that Stripe does not because since it is a PayPal company. First, you can accept payments via Venmo which is a huge plus in the US since so many people us it. Plus you can use PayPal checkout which many people already use and are familiar with. This allows users to log in to their existing PayPal account so they don't have to enter their payment details on your site.
- Plaid - Plaid is an incredible product, if you've ever connected your bank to another product you've probably used it. Plaid has built relationships with many banks in the United States and allows users to login directly with their credentials for you can get access to their account and routing number. Stripe has a direct partnership with Plaid so you never come into contact with their banking information and you just pass around tokens to connect their bank to Stripe. This is great for security since you ever have to worry about leaking their bank credentials. Plaid is a great solution if you are accepting larger sized payments and want the users to use ACH bank transfers in Stripe for lower fees.
- Baremetrics - Baremetrics is not a payment processor but it is a great complimentary product to add to your payments stack one you are processing a lot of money. They add great charting and insights and integrate directly into your payment processor.
There are many solutions you can use for sending emails to your users. It is important to note there are two types of emails; transactional and marketing. Transaction are emails directed to specific users based on actions they perform. Examples include reset password emails, payment receipts, notification emails that they have a new message, etc. Marketing emails are emails sent to larger groups of users that are general. These can include new feature newsletters, terms of service changes, new blog post notification, etc.
Postmark is a great solution for transactional emails.
- Pricing:
- Ease of integration and management:
- Security and data privacy:
- Extras: Postmark is currently beta-ing a transactional email product as well.
- SendGrid -
Typically you won't need a marketing email solution upfront unless you are growing a large subscribe wait-list. Mailchimp is one of the more popular solutions in this category but it is expensive and a lot of the core features aren't available unless you are on a premium subscription. There are some cheaper and friendly solutions that are worth starting with.
mailjet is an affordable solution with the perfect set of features.
- Pricing:
- Ease of integration and management:
- Security and data privacy:
- Extras:
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If you would like to contribute please do! The more input we get the better this guide will become. In the coming weeks I will create an official contributing guide but for now here are the steps:
We use Github Flow, so all code changes happen through pull requests. Pull requests are the best way to propose changes to the codebase (we use Github Flow). We actively welcome your pull requests:
- Fork the repo and create your branch from
master. - If you've added code that should be tested, add tests.
- If you've changed APIs, update the documentation.
- Ensure the test suite passes.
- Make sure your code lints.
- Issue that pull request!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
