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It depends a lot on what your product does, so it's hard to give an estimate. I've built SaaS products that only took a few weeks. I've built ones that took 6 months.

One way to save significant time/money is by using a SaaS starter kit. There's one for just about every stack these days: https://bullettrain.co (Rails), https://divjoy.com (Node/React), https://saaspegasus.com (Django), https://spark.laravel.com (PHP/Laravel). Ideally you're not wasting any time on this boilerplate.

Hosting: Yeah I really need to expand those hosting options. It was one of those things I expected to do much sooner, but didn't end up getting as many requests for hosts as I expected (at least compared to other features). That's changing a bit now now that Divjoy gives you something a bit more advanced. That attracts customers with more complex needs and, it would seem, more opinions around hosting. Firebase Hosting and Heroku are up next. Probably AWS after that.

Previewing code: Happy to send over an example codebase if you shoot an email to hello@divjoy.com :) I'm going to be rolling out a code preview so customers can explore what their code will look like when exported. Plan is to let non-customers browse at least some it it.. or maybe just view half of each file.. or maybe I'm overthinking it and I should just let everyone see the code and emphasize they aren't legally licensed to use it. Anyway, definitely something I've been thinking about.

Glad you like it! By functions as a service do you mean functionality hosted by me or shipping serverless functions with the codebase? At the moment you get any necessary server logic as serverless functions (formatted correctly for your chosen host) or if you choose "Other" for your host you get an Express.js server. Definitely interested in supporting AWS cognito/dynamo/s3 or bundling all that up into an AWS Amplify option.

Yeah there's always a bit of a trade-off there. You naturally learn how things work very well by building them yourself. In terms of the code that Divjoy gives you, I try to keep abstractions to a minimum and include as many helpful code comments as I can.

Totally understand that! TS is coming at some point.. just don't have an ETA yet as I need to iron out some issues with TS support in the editor.

Great to hear! Out of curiosity, would you prefer Divjoy offer the UI for that or would you want to roll your own (or use the official Tailwind UI)?

Check out http://docs.divjoy.com for a changelog and roadmap. Tailwind is coming this year. If there's anything you need that's not on there feel free to shoot me a message. And yeah I was really excited to see the Stripe CTO sign up! He's used it to build a bunch of side project, including this one which is in use at his kid's school right now: https://bonjourmaclasse.com

I'm going to be adding a Tailwind option soon that gives you the basic config + no UI. Hopefully useful to people that want to roll their own or drop in components from tailwindui.com. Later this year will be building out my own Tailwind kit for Divjoy users.

Yes, for sure! A lot of people have been asking for Postgres and I want to get that in this year. For now some customers are using the "Other" DB option, which gives you a REST API where you can connect to your DB of choice.

Hey HN, Divjoy is a tool that allows you to generate a fully-functioning SaaS app. You get a React UI, auth, database, stripe payments, billing, and so on.

What makes it different from your average boilerplate is that you can customize your tech stack and UI before exporting your code. For example you can choose between Material UI, Bootstrap, or Bulma for your UI. Firebase or Auth0 for auth, and so on down the stack.

It then runs your app in our built-in editor where you can play with styles and drop in new components from the Divjoy library. The idea is to give you that "Aha! I'm building something and it works!" moment right away. That's a better experience than spending your first few hours sifting through docs.

You can try all this out without signing up or paying. Just head to the site, pick some options, then a template.

PS. You may remember my original Show HN from over a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044). The 2.0 version takes that concept and expands it from mostly static sites to full SaaS apps.

I’d argue that most people absolutely should not account for it. There’s enough to stress out about when trying to get your startup off the ground. The idea that your “spending” 2Ok a month due to opportunity cost is not helpful and probably likely to lead to burnout. On the other hand, saving a little money and knowing you’ve extended your runway an extra 3 months can be very helpful.

Thanks for buying! Once you give it a try I’d love to hear any feedback you have or requests for new components/integrations.

Looks like they don't have time, but there's an open issue here: https://github.com/DavidWells/analytics/issues/96. I probably won't have time for awhile.. but on the off-chance you're interested in tackling it, I'd happily hook you up with a free Divjoy account in return ;)

That's a really good point! I may have a good number of those customers and not be aware of it. I need to do a better job of asking people what they're using Divjoy for.

Thanks for letting me know! If you scroll down below the "Choose your template" section do you see a pricing section with purple background? I'm wondering if the scroll to logic is broken or if that section is just not being displayed. If you wouldn't mind shooting an email to gabe.ragland@divjoy.com I'd love to follow-up about this.

For Divjoy I'm using Stripe and PayPal (one-time payments). In terms of the code I give customers, I'm just doing Stripe subscription billing via the hosted Stripe Checkout page.

Thanks, that's great to hear! I'm not a fan of having to signup/pay to see how an app works either. Figured a tech audience would appreciate that.

This is what my product does: https://divjoy.com

Gives you a full stack React app with UI, auth, db, payments, etc. Can be customized in the tool prior to export.

Would love to hear if this is what you’re looking for or if you had something different in mind.

The blog ranks really well without any special effort, but for Divjoy I haven't put in the work of setting up extra landing pages to rank for different topics. For example, I'd like to have a page like divjoy.com/nextjs+stripe that emphasizes that stack combination.

Gotcha! Then it shouldn't be too hard to integrate Authorize. UI is mostly decoupled from payment logic. Always happy to hop on a call if you need some help understanding anything in the codebase.

I'd say that if you're interesting in learning to code then Divjoy may work for you. I try not to over sell it to non-devs, but I do have a fair amount of customers who are hacking at Divjoy projects while learning to code and are very happy with that.

Since all the boilerplate works out of the box you can skip over a bunch of stuff (like understanding how auth works under the hood), but generally there's some custom logic you need to write and you'll want to pickup some JS/React to do that.

Any integration with Authorize.net would be totally done by you. You could export a codebase with Stripe payments so that you can at least see how payments logic ties in with UI.. but you'd need to then strip that out and replace with your own custom Authorize integration.

I've been meaning to look into that. At the moment I'm using this library as the analytics abstraction: https://getanalytics.io. I'll see if the Plausible team wants to create a plugin or do that myself when I have time.

My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you.

That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.

Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback.

A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.

I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there.

Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me.

[0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4

[3] https://usehooks.com

Big fan. The founder is worth following: https://twitter.com/lunchbag

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :)

It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance.

The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

[0] https://divjoy.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...

Goals:

- Grow my business from $50k to $100k/y

- Grow number of dogs from 1 to 2

- Live a more balanced, healthy lifestyle

- Hang out with friends/family in person again

I’m building https://divjoy.com. My approach has been to let people make high level changes in a low-code editor (create pages, rearrange sections, tweak global styles) and then export as a React/Node codebase where they build their custom functionality. It doesn’t help with your specific use-case yet, but that’s a great example of something I’d like to enable just by dropping a “tweets list” component into your UI.

I few years back I made an ETH collectibles game, like Crypto Kitties, but simpler. It was just to learn how eth/solidity worked, but to my surprise people actually started buying and selling the items. It made me around $20k in a few weeks (took a small % of transactions). Eventually, I realized it was basically just a bunch of crypto wales playing hot potato and at times using bots to bid things up. No one really thought these items would have any long term value. Not much different than most alt coins I guess. It died out on its own and I was happy do be done with it since running an online casino wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.

Cool, just signed up! Transitioning my Zapier-powered twitter alerts over. Love the thought you've put into this, like ability to hide results authored by certain usernames.

Nice work! I'd love something that alerted me to mentions in Discord servers. Not sure if that's doable without having a bot in every server.. but I'd pay for that.