What tech stack would you choose for building SaaS side projects as a single developer if these were your priorities:
- build it once, deploy and forget for months or years;
- adding new features is easy (once it's needed once a year or even less frequently). "Easy" here means little time spent reminding yourself how the app works and where to add new features;
- deploying is simple and can be done with little to no setup;
- language/platform/dependencies updates are infrequent, easy to do, unlikely to break the app;
- open source and developed by a community, no dependency on an enterprise.
* Python/Django framework (Django itself has 17+ years "on the road" - that's forever enough for me) * Postgres as my main database * Bootstrap as main UI (customized via Sass - not too fancy though) * Unpoly (https://unpoly.com) for frontend and the SPA "feeling" of the app - absolutely no JS frameworks (React, Vue, etc.) - my SaaS product will be mainly CRUD operations, no fancy/dynamic stuff.
Change Django for Rails (or any other "magic" framework) and you're good to go.
With this you stack you have a dead simple web application that can be completely self contained in the executable with `go:embed`. That makes deployment an absolute breeze. Since I also attempt to use as few third party packages as possible and the ones I do use are pure Go, I can containerize my app and deploy it with Google's distroless base image. That helps in reducing my attack surface.
And while my app is a monolith using an embedded LibSQL database (SQlite), I can easily change my app configurations via environment variables to use a remote LibSQL server and then scale my app behind a load balancer with more servers.
It's honestly such a simple yet effective stack for development. My one web app handles both the api and web requests, I can easily scale, and building my app is fast.
Edit: I should also preface, that all the HTML/CSS/JS used by my website are (mostly) vanilla and developed by myself. So no use of a CSS library like Bootstrap, Bulma, or Tailwind. And also no use of JS libraries like JQuery. I do use HTMX and Alpine, but they are both being embedded into the executable like I stated above.
1. the tech-stack you already know well.
if you are familiar with something: build on your existing experience.
2. php + some mature & well documented framework like laravel
php is often disliked by the "we know it better" crowd here on HN.
but: it offers a high rate of productivity, is easier to deploy on a wide range of hosting-possibilities than anything using python or other script-languages
preface: i would recommend the following only if you already have experience with it!!
3. python + some mature & well documented framework like django
in my experience: deploying / maintaining python-based webapps is more effort than php-based ones
just my 0.02 €
> language/platform/dependencies updates are infrequent, easy to do, unlikely to break the app;
I'll second the Django, Rails, Laravel, but also add something statically typed like Java with Spring if this is purely an API backend. Static types will give you peace of mind during runtime for years.
Stick to relational databases. Don't buy into hype stuff on Medium blogs. You can go a long way on a VPS with an LTS distro on auto-update (very few SaaS businesses actually have scale that exceeds what a modern VPS can do).
(You could also use Larave + Inertia js + React/Vue)
I think Livewire is way faster to develop in and has less bloat/complexity.
Laravel Jetstream gives you scaffold and auth + 2FA out of the box.
TailwindUI is cut and paste LEGO like components (you'll have to Alpine js some of them but it's quick and easy)
Tons of Laravel packages available to do what you need to do.
Laravel Spark if you want a fast SaaS in a box for connecting to Stripe
Laravel Forge (EC2) or Vapor (Serverless) makes spinning up servers and deployment super easy.
Some of these are paid but you can definitley do it without them but all the paid items have crazy ROI.