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The ultimate SaaS template (github.com/gmpetrov)
75 points by gptrv on Sept 23, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 58 comments


As someone who has their own SaaS bootstrap template and has been looking around the market. I can say, this is not the ultimate.

If you look at either:

* https://www.getparthenon.com

* https://www.saaspegasus.com

I think you'll see lots of features you should incorporate into yours.


Perhaps 'ultimate' in the name is more aspirational than objective, but thank you for the helpful "see also" links.


Anybody know if these support building and selling an API? I've been trying to find a good + cheap/free set of tools to build an APIaaS that includes payment (stripe), rate throttling, auth


Has anyone used saaspegasus? I've been on the fence about purchasing it.


I've personally seen quite a few people on Twitter talk about how good it is. I don't think I've seen anyone speak badly about it.

(It's not mine)


Parthenon is your one, is that right?


Yea.


As a Symfony dev/architect who builds a lot for startups, I've been meaning to check it out. I'll be honest, I don't quite understand the value proposition so it's always #2 on my todo list.


> I'll be honest, I don't quite understand the value proposition so it's always #2 on my todo list

Yea, I need to sort that out. It should be a lot clearer. I would say the the benefits are the same as other bootstraps and templates as well as open source libraries. It provides you functionality so you don't need to code it yourself.

My main thing with open source is that bug fixes are very much optional, even if you provide the fix. They're also not designed for scale. I really want to be able to provide top level support.

Then you have the fact that you need to use multiple libraries that sometimes don't really play well nice with each other. Everything integrates with each other.

Open source libraries and others aren't actually designed for scale or the company growing and needing to replace parts. That is one area I tried to put effort into making sure you can replace things and use your own. For example, it comes with A/B testing, you can literally switch between mines and optimizely. The admin section (Athena) for example can work with Doctrine ORM or MongoDB and uses the repository interface to allow any database system to be used. While still being heavily inspired by Sonata.

Then there are things like file uploads which I've added the glue between Symfony and Flysystem.

Emails we support quite a few email service providers which can be changed via config. Unlike the symfony mailer which you can also use the integrations with the service providers allows you to use the templates with Sendgird, etc.

And obivously I'm planning on extending it further.

If you want a discount code email me at iain@humblyarrogant.io and I'll hook you up with a discount.


Great! I'm really happy it's out there, because it seems Laravel sucks all the air out of this bit of the market, when I much prefer Symfony.

I'd be happy to chat about it in more detail if you want to ping me. Contact details are on my profile page.


Hello :wave: This is my template to quickstart a SAAS project with Typescript/Next.js/NextAuth.js/Prisma/Stripe/Tailwindcss/Postgresql https://github.com/gmpetrov/utlimate-saas-js Stop losing time implementing authentication and payment over and over again. Focus on what brings value to your customers !

Demo: https://utlimate-saas-js.vercel.app/


Very nice! Have to point out the spelling error, losing* not loosing.


I'm glad you found it usefull. Sorry for the misspelling ! (i'm not english native )


Also, maybe you intended for the repository to be called "ultimate-saas-js" instead of "utlimate-saas-js"?


FYI your pricing page currently has the lorem ipsum text where it would show "what's included" with each tier.


This is page is just a demo of what you can create with this template ! It's not an actual product

BTW you can try the checkout flow by using the credit card number 4242 4242 4242 4242


wow, I am sorry! I should wake up a bit before making comments on HN!


I believe that is intentional. This is boilerplate, and it is expected you'd put in your own feature list.


I don't believe that's a mistake - it's a demo of their SaaS template using placeholder text


also "Enterprise" is misspelt as "Entreprise"


From the Github profile, OP is French, in which "entreprise" is "enterprise".


Sorry for the misspelling. Yes i'm french :)


Not sure if intentional or not but on the pricing page when you click on 'Yearly billing' the price is still displayed as '/month'.


Bravo. This is well presented and will no doubt help some people get past the inception stage.


Any plans to expand it? What’s your roadmap?


I'dont have a roadmap. I'would like the template to stay generic. I'guess I'll add features when i meet the need. Do you have a specific feature in mind ?


Is this what HN has come to? Upvoting low effort posts with cookie cutter programming templates? This is the kind of garbage that constantly gets posted to all programming subreddits to everyone's dismay, and usually gets downvoted to oblivion, as it should.

Here's a protip: The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

Also.. SaaS with next? If you're building a SaaS application, you're probably building an API first and an application second. You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.


I just wanted to share my side-project of the last weekend. I've made it for myself first. It is a very opinionated template, made with the tools i like to use currently (Typescript, Prisma, Next.JS) I'll be happy if it's useful to someone else. I'm sad you found that it's garbage :(


If it makes you feel better, he's dead wrong. Whenever I'm building a new software project I'm always thinking "God damn why do I have to start from scratch every time for the same things."

I do really wish there were a well-established open source framework for bootstrapping projects with authentication and payments, something that was vetted by a lot of people though.


My dream :)


I don’t think your project is garbage, but you also called it the “ultimate” template, which as you pointed out below was a bit of marketing on your part. It’s not surprising that someone in HN is going to call you out on the marketing fluff.


I like that you posted a useful template, but it is difficult to see why it's so much better than all the alternatives that it deserves the title "ultimate". Perhaps if it just said "Open-source template for bootstrapping a SaaS project" that would be better.


This is the ultimate template for ME :)


My son is the most special thing in the world for me, but if I post his picture on a parents' forum saying "The ultimate child", I suspect some would disagree.

It's a useful project, and I genuinely thank you for sharing it. That people are upvoting it and commenting positively on it gives me much more information than you saying it's "the ultimate".


haha i'm a dad too, and my son is by far the ultimate baby :) I'see you point. But the fact that the software is public on github makes it implicitly "Open Source". Also a bit of "marketing" doesn't hurt for sharing ideas/projects


On HN, I would say it does hurt. Too many people here remember Digg c. 2007, when everything was "the ultimate" so it chafes whenever we see it here, lest our precious community end up the same way.

My usual rule is:

> If you feel the need to tell me how good it is, I'll assume it's not very good


Didn't knew about the no-marketing rule on HN sorry for that


I thought it was great. Thank you for sharing and being part of the Next.js community.


The target market is much larger than your empty set dig suggests.

There are very talented developers, often deeply technical and highly skilled in areas separate from the idiosyncrasies of building SaaS web apps, who appreciate a functional jump start in an area outside of their core competency.

If your expertise extends to the areas covered by OP's SaaS template, consider offering suggestions rather than dismissing the (graciously shared) project's entire raison d'etre.


> Also.. SaaS with next? If you're building a SaaS application, you're probably building an API first and an application second. You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

Oh no, someone tell rauchg and the rest of the Vercel team that they've not only built a terrible framework (next.js) but their using it to build Vercel is also bad because checks notes IceDane on HN said nobody does this.


My God, it's just a cool weekend programming project. Calm down and tone down the elitist attitude.

> You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

How about you build a SaaS with whatever gets the job done? Could be a single PHP file as long as it ships.


> Here's a protip: The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

Why? Considering the mess that is JS development, it's nice to have projects like that to quickly evaluate some options.

> Also.. SaaS with next? If you're building a SaaS application, you're probably building an API first and an application second. You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

That sounds like a very specific vision of SaaS, one mainly aimed at programmers. That's not the only kind of SaaS out there.


> The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

It really isn't.


> The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

It's nice to start from something that is not an empty canvas. That said, I think this one mixes way too many independent opinions to be useful.

Anyway, "I made a thing, what do you think" is a common kind of post here, and starting templates are something that attracts a lot of interest.


> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I don't know man, I find it pretty useful.


Reading this gave me a similar "beginning-of-the-end" vibe. Just last night I complained to my SO for hours about how B2B sales are going to destroy our current notion of the individual developer. I shudder to imagine what "development" will look like in 10 years: you pay Github $0.25 for access to your online dev environment, then $0.05 for each debug build and $0.50 for each release build? It sounds insane to frame things like that, but both Apple and Google have made it clear that they intend to move app compilation off-device.

So yeah, I have a hard time seeing anything other than dystopia when I look at this. It's certainly not poorly made or developed in bad faith, but the optics and rhetoric around it really make me sick.


Just a reminder, it's very similar to: https://github.com/vercel/nextjs-subscription-payments

( he mentioned it in the Readme too)


I was inspired by this project, but i didn't like the stack.


I played with next/next-auth and what was appealing was how cheaply you could run an app.

one thing that i didn’t have time to look into is the latency profile when you manage sessions on your own with all the application logic on edge lambda functions and the database in one data center like us-east-1.

then i started experimenting with edge redis clusters that sit closer to the lambda functions, but that was a huge pain and still not as cheap as i wanted because the redis provider was charging per redis command.

i excited to play with aurora serverless v2 for postgres


True, this stack is very cost efficient for bootstrapping a project. I'm sure you could optimize the latency with hosting yourself with aws lambda functions etc... But the point is, if you're bootstraping a business, you should focus on what brings value to your customers :)


Honestly, this is the reason why I think Google's Firebase (and accompanying Firestore database) is absolute gold.

Firebase handles all the complexity for you. You get a nice set of JS SDKs for auth, database, cloud functions, file storage and static hosting.

And the best part is how damn cheap it is.

No fussing with low-level Redis clusters or paying for things on the edge. It all 'just works' and it does it fast.


I'd be interested more in Firebase if I could specify a SQL schema. I don't want to work around the headaches of a document store...


The Blitz.js documentation discusses some problems with deploying an RDBMS-backed app to Vercel. Have you encountered any of these? https://blitzjs.com/docs/deploy-vercel


No issues encountered regarding postgresql with Vercel yet. Could be fun to stress test the stack :)


The repository has been renamed. https://github.com/gmpetrov/ultimate-saas-ts


One of the best "first posts" I have seen on HN. Kudos.

Edit: I will let the hyperbole bit (ultimate) slide, considering this is your first ever post here :-)


:)




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