Your SaaS Runs on What? Should You Be Coding or Paying

A lot of building a SaaS platform is standing on the shoulders of giants.

There are places where you will need to invest in third-party vendor infrastructure to get off the ground.

But as we were building our platform, we noticed a lot of surrounding support services were things we could build ourselves. That exercise quickly became in addiction, but also made us realize a lot of the mainstream tools out there don’t necessarily work with your workflow.

Here’s an inside look, and how much money we ended up saving along the way. We’ll keep it updated as continue to build and save.

Pick Big, Proven, and Premium for Your Necessary Costs

Regardless of your end-product, it needs to live on an eco-system and tech stack.

For reliability, scaling, and security purposes these are areas you don’t want to skimp on. They are necessary evils and will impact the way your service feels.

For us, it looked like:

1. WordPress hosting server — for customers to manage their sites. Third-party vendor, proprietary.
2. Cloudflare — for the end-point Static hosting.

And guess what? We’re not in the position to recreate the wheel with WordPress or Static hosting. In fact, 99.9% of the hosting providers out there are building their networks on something. It honestly boils down to AWS or Google at the end of the day.

WordPress Hosting Quality Might’ve Been Overlooked

Our product takes WordPress sites from where they’re at, converts them to static, and pushes them to Static hosting.

I think a lot of people in the same scenario might frankly overlook WordPress because it’s early in the supply chain.

Come on, how many people actually use their WordPress site after that first push to Static?

Our mission (see how we find our, sigh, why) is to align Static WordPress with the dynamic and instant gratification of regular WordPress.

And we found that 97% of our customers weren’t “setting and forgetting” their WordPress site. Sure, Static allows you to do it, but it wasn’t playing out in actuality.

A lot of our customers were moving to Static not just for security purposes, but because their WordPress sites were bogged down by slow Plugins and Themes. We had to make sure they wouldn’t feel that while actually managing their site because it would quickly make our service feel sub-par.

So we invested substantially in that infrastructure, rivaling the CPU power of your most-enterprise WordPress-only hosting platforms.

Sure, you get a site every once in a while that still has its issues — due to Plugin selection, Theme Builder, and years of crud collecting in the backend. But still, it feels faster than the ultra-hyped service they just migrated from. And that was the point.

But What About the Rest? Build to Suit Your Unique Needs and Save Money While Doing It

SaaS relies on customer portal, key background functionalities, and support services.

This is where we quickly found it was more worthwhile to build it ourselves for two reasons.

1. These Aren’t Revolutionary Products – We Can Code Them Ourselves

Customer portal?

Live support?

Back up and restore functions?

Yeah, we got those in the bag. And they didn’t take that long to build from scratch.

The alternative? Paying third-party vendors and eroding into our margin, and for what … Laziness?

Here are some things we built, and the savings we’re seeing

1. Back up and restore services.
   1. Conservatively, we could’ve paid $100+/mo. for something like Backup Buddy.
2. Customer portal
   1. I’m sure there are solutions, and costly ones with the amount of customers we have. Let’s call it $200+/mo. in savings
3. Live Support
   1. Nestled in our Customer Portal. Intercom starts at $79/mo. and scales pretty rapidly

2. They Don’t Do EXACTLY What We Need

Probably the most important takeaway: the premium services for all of the above are meant for the every-company.

Third-party backup services weren’t set up to connect between our Customer Portal and the WordPress sites.
It would’ve been as much time to get them integrated as it would be to just build it.

Customer Portal
There isn’t a solution in the market that could fit the custom specs we needed. If you’re building your own SaaS, you’re more or less required to build the customer portal yourself too.

It’s as important as the primary product itself.

Intercom and Similar Live Chats Didn’t Do What We Wanted
We wanted full control of the workflow from customer opens chat, to waits for our team to reply.

We also wanted them directly sent to our Slack Channel where we could actually just type and reply a message to them right from there.

Intercom? No way. Building it allowed us to tailor it to these specs, and save ourselves a lot of time and money long-term.

The Disclaimer: It Does Need Kept Up

What you do build in-house, you do need to support, innovate, and constantly improve upon.

But since it’s linked to your infrastructure you can continue tailoring it more and more to your unique platform developments.

To me, that pays dividends long-term.

About the Author
Ben Butler is founder and lead developer of Headless Hostman, and the owner of Top Hat — a design and web agency.

About SaaSwatch
Our diary of building SaaS and the diary of others building their’s.