I'm not saying RoR doesn't have its faults, I've left it behind too. But I can't deny its productivity, and even in 2024 I would be hard pressed to name something better for a SAAS company starting out.
I dislike many things about Ruby, but RoR is extremely hard to beat. Basically, everything you need in a stack is provided or readily available in the community.
Of course if we're being really real, the first piece of advice should actually be "Can this be Wordpress?"
Yup. I’m a huge fan of rails, but I’m an even larger fan of not writing code in the first place.
If a spreadsheet can solve your problem, I’m going to suggest a spreadsheet.
If a vendor can solve your problem well enough, I’ll suggest a vendor.
My time, energy, and attention is valuable. I’m here for the problems you can’t or shouldn’t outsource.
With wordpress:
- you are now suddenly also a database administrator
- the different people touching the admin interface will break things in subtle ways
- welcome an incomprehensible security nightmare into your life
Yes, wordpress is extremely easy to set up. Maintain? Nope!
Good managed wordpress starts at like $10-20/month. All those problems you mention go away, you can even do things like rollbacks if someone breaks something. If what you want to do fits into what WP can do pretty well, it's a no-brainer.
I co-organise an event with a non-technical friend. Previously it was using some sort of a custom cms which was hell. I set it up with Jekyll, created a GitHub account for my friend and taught him markdown (five minutes perhaps). Yes he breaks things occasionally. That's fine! Everything is versioned, so I can easily fix things.
When the successful company was founded back in the noughties RoR was arguably miles ahead of everything else. An argument could certainly be made about time-to-market and iteration speed. For the later there were a lot of other viable options available..
> even in 2024 I would be hard pressed to name something better for a SAAS company starting
My sense, at least looking at the stacks for tons of recent YC companies, is that most startups are all in on JavaScript these days. Might not actually be better(though I prefer it), but that seems to be the trend.
...well, congratulations!