How I built my tiny SaaS from idea to first 15+ paying customers
In this technical retrospective (2019), @hernansartorio shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 69 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 16 comments
Congratulations on launching! Now that the product's launched, are you planning to go back to a day job?
Thanks for including a shot of your Sketch mockup; when I learned HTML/CSS/JS, it was 2014, and the "wireframe to HTML" craze was in full swing, and discouraged the creation of mockups.
Having built some sites since then, I cannot say enough about the value of using something like Sketch or Figma to design the site first. This means creating the style guide (typographic scale, primary/secondary colours, layout), mocking up some pages, and figuring out if you're happy with it. Only then do I start writing the HTML and CSS.
Before that, I'd code everything first and always feel like the design was off, but I didn't know why. Building it out in a prototyping tool helps you visualize the site much better, and when it's time to code, you will already have the color codes, font sizes, line-heights etc. ready to paste into the CSS.
Two things:
- First: congratulations! your platform looks really nice!
- Second: for anyone reading, want a billion dollar idea? create a platform like stripe that works in uruguay and all latin america (stripe only has a beta in Brasil) and allows subscriptions (Paypal which the author cites, doesn't allow them, and forces him to charge a single paymet for one year)
Very smooth experience, this is really easy to use and unobtrusive. Kudos on launching this and best of luck with it!
Well done, all the best for the future mate!!1