Ask HN: How do you set up a SaaS as a solopreneur?
10 comments
While I agree that Stripe is great for payments, Stripe Subscriptions and Stripe Billing were never really built specifically for SaaS.
The problem seems easy at first when you have just one plan at $100/month, you'll quickly have many more plans, all kind of discounts and special deals, custom "enterprise" plans for your larger customers and design partners, while having to grandfather your existing customer base and also allow easy upgrades/downgrades etc. A lot of SaaS pricing these days is built around tiers with certain usage limits on individual features, so you'll need to built that as well. And if you are working on an application with a fixed underlying cost for certain features (like genai tokens), you'll also have to implement metering. None of this is really part of your core product and yet most SaaS startups spent a lot of time building and maintaining (billing is hard!) the same functionality over and over again.
There are a few new modern players (disclaimer - I'm the CTO of one of them [0]) in the SaaS subscription mamagement and adjacent usage billing space now and I would highly recommend using such a solution while still relying on Stripe for just the payment processing part. It will save you a lot of technical headaches down the road and even should allow you to get started quicker (for example, we provide you with embedded pricing pages, quoting and sign up links, feature entitlements per customer, full metering support and much more out of the box) and iterate over your pricing faster as you grow.
[0] https://wingback.com
There are a few new modern players (disclaimer - I'm the CTO of one of them [0]) in the SaaS subscription mamagement and adjacent usage billing space now and I would highly recommend using such a solution while still relying on Stripe for just the payment processing part. It will save you a lot of technical headaches down the road and even should allow you to get started quicker (for example, we provide you with embedded pricing pages, quoting and sign up links, feature entitlements per customer, full metering support and much more out of the box) and iterate over your pricing faster as you grow.
[0] https://wingback.com
maybe a piece of feedback: your landing page is beautiful but I kinda spent a few minutes trying to find what your software actually looks like, and couldn't. Then I thought of checking the docs for the API description and it's restricted. =(
Hey - fellow solopreneur SaaS founder here.
I made BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.net ) and have dealt with a few of the same issues here, so I will try my best to answer them:
1. I use License Keys for my project, which I store in my own database associated to the user account that made the purchase. LemonSqueezy allows you to send custom data with a purchase, so I send the user token with the payment link users click on from inside my app when they make the purchase. You can then get this same custom data back in a webhook, which you can use to associate the purchase with a specific user account once it has been made along with the LemonSqueezy subscriptionId. It is a relatively minimal amount of work to achieve this, and LemonSqueezy has examples for how to verify their webhook data that you can just copy and paste into your own. I am sure other payment providers are similar as well. Once that data is in my local database, it's a simple query lookup to see if a user has paid or not (be sure to also handle cases for subscription cancellation and expiration though - also webhook events!).
2. If you are worried about taxes, then you can use a MoR (Merchant of Record) payment provider like LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, or Paddle. I personally use LemonSqueezy because I liked their UI the best, and they supported license keys as part of the purchase.
Good luck with your business!
I made BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.net ) and have dealt with a few of the same issues here, so I will try my best to answer them:
1. I use License Keys for my project, which I store in my own database associated to the user account that made the purchase. LemonSqueezy allows you to send custom data with a purchase, so I send the user token with the payment link users click on from inside my app when they make the purchase. You can then get this same custom data back in a webhook, which you can use to associate the purchase with a specific user account once it has been made along with the LemonSqueezy subscriptionId. It is a relatively minimal amount of work to achieve this, and LemonSqueezy has examples for how to verify their webhook data that you can just copy and paste into your own. I am sure other payment providers are similar as well. Once that data is in my local database, it's a simple query lookup to see if a user has paid or not (be sure to also handle cases for subscription cancellation and expiration though - also webhook events!).
2. If you are worried about taxes, then you can use a MoR (Merchant of Record) payment provider like LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, or Paddle. I personally use LemonSqueezy because I liked their UI the best, and they supported license keys as part of the purchase.
Good luck with your business!
Stripe, Paddle and Lemonsqueezy are good choices.
Keep it simple in the beginning just set up subscriptions/billing and a few basic plans to get users signing up and working out the flow since it sounds like your first time.
Lemonsqueezy and Paddle handles taxes out of the box (Stripe is working on a tax solution). It sounds like most jurisdictions have thresholds you have to break before you have to pay sales tax. It varies greatly so it's probably worth a little extra cost to have that covered from the start. But early on I'm not sure it's completely necessary.
What framework are you building on?
Here are SaaS in a box billing/subscription tools for Rails and Laravel https://bullettrain.co/ https://spark.laravel.com/
Good luck.
Keep it simple in the beginning just set up subscriptions/billing and a few basic plans to get users signing up and working out the flow since it sounds like your first time.
Lemonsqueezy and Paddle handles taxes out of the box (Stripe is working on a tax solution). It sounds like most jurisdictions have thresholds you have to break before you have to pay sales tax. It varies greatly so it's probably worth a little extra cost to have that covered from the start. But early on I'm not sure it's completely necessary.
What framework are you building on?
Here are SaaS in a box billing/subscription tools for Rails and Laravel https://bullettrain.co/ https://spark.laravel.com/
Good luck.
As a solopreneur myself for the last 3 years, I’ve tried every solution mentioned here.
The best solution I have found and what I currently use is https://www.outseta.com/
It handles everything: from authentication to help desk, to transactional emails, marketing emails to sales funnel, subscription management.
Everything is basically no code so you don’t end up needing to build anything yourself that isn’t central to your value prop.
You can get it running in one day. Highly recommend.
The best solution I have found and what I currently use is https://www.outseta.com/
It handles everything: from authentication to help desk, to transactional emails, marketing emails to sales funnel, subscription management.
Everything is basically no code so you don’t end up needing to build anything yourself that isn’t central to your value prop.
You can get it running in one day. Highly recommend.
Outseta is nice, real problem solver, but I have some issues.
- Webhooks are slow. Often delayed. - Subscriptions are not saved in Stripe, but in their own platform - I found a huge dataleak a while ago. They fixed it quite fast after reporting. - Hard to use for European companies (tax). - API is quite basic
- Webhooks are slow. Often delayed. - Subscriptions are not saved in Stripe, but in their own platform - I found a huge dataleak a while ago. They fixed it quite fast after reporting. - Hard to use for European companies (tax). - API is quite basic
Hard to be very detailed here without knowing a lot about what you are doing.. However here are some ideas.
1. USA - Stripe for payments and managing subscriptions. They have numerous tools for doing so. Their subscription handling is pretty good at the moment and useful for people who want to cancel etc. The handled processing, fraud etc. Pretty simple to setup with your saas.
2. Talk with an accountant or lawyer for your specifics regarding the state. They differ wildly so you want to make sure you are prepped and handling that from the beginning. Any good accountant should take about an hour to break this all down for you. Worth the $$.
Best of luck.
1. USA - Stripe for payments and managing subscriptions. They have numerous tools for doing so. Their subscription handling is pretty good at the moment and useful for people who want to cancel etc. The handled processing, fraud etc. Pretty simple to setup with your saas.
2. Talk with an accountant or lawyer for your specifics regarding the state. They differ wildly so you want to make sure you are prepped and handling that from the beginning. Any good accountant should take about an hour to break this all down for you. Worth the $$.
Best of luck.
Just use a pret-a-porte payment system, lile Stripe, Square, Paddle, Clover etc. They will handle your plans and recurring payments for you.
Avalara (https://www.avalara.com/) does tax calculations for SaaS - you give it a list of prices, the address of your customer, and the type of good/service each item is, and it tells you the correct amount of tax to charge :)
1. and 2. Just use Paddle.
Note that you still need a legal entity to receive your income and probably an accountant to do your taxes.
Note that you still need a legal entity to receive your income and probably an accountant to do your taxes.
1. How do you manage the SAAS part? From credit card processing to managing the subscriptions, to integrating it into the project? Any suggestions?
2. What about taxes? How do you collect and remit them to the state? (I'm in the USA.)
This is a huge hole in my knowledge, and I would appreciate any information or guidance that you can offer!
Thank you!