How to choose your tech stack for your SAAS business

7 key aspects to look at before starting your business

Intro

A SaaS business is an exciting and rewarding venture that comes with its own set of challenges. Choosing the right tech stack technologies is one of the biggest challenges. A tech stack is a set of technologies that you will use to create and deliver web-based products or services. It includes everything from the programming languages and frameworks used for building the application, to the infrastructure that hosts and delivers it.

Nowadays, there are many different web stack technologies to choose from. It is overwhelming to try to figure out which ones are the best fit for your business. In this post, we’ll show you 7 key factors to consider when choosing your web stack. You’ll also find some tips for making the right decision for your business.

1. Business needs

Before looking at specific technologies, take a step back and look at the needs of your business. What type of product or service you’re offering, what is your target audience, and what are the unique requirements or constraints?

For example, if you’re building a consumer-facing SaaS product, you focus on technologies that are easy to use and have a good user experience. A complex business product requires technologies that are scalable and able to handle large amounts of data.

2. Team’s skills and Resources

Once you defined the business needs, the next step is to check the skills and resources of your team. This means technical skills and available resources for development and maintenance.

If your team has senior developers in a particular technology, it makes sense to keep that stack. But, if your team is smaller or less experienced, you focus on technologies that are easier to learn. Also, consider the technologies that have a larger community of users and developers.

3. Ecosystem and Community Support

A large ecosystem and a big community around it is a proof of a good technology stack. In the beginning, a good tutorial helps you put your application up and running fast. Later, detailed documentation can help you develop faster and fix tricky problems. Look at the size and activity of the developer community. A large community can be an invaluable resource for finding solutions to problems. It also provides feedback on your product and keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field. Popular technologies pass the test of time. It’s worth considering them for better long-term support and easiness to hire.

4. Scalability and Performance

We go now into the critical factors. It means that they can determine the level of success and cannot be easily changed in the future. Always focus on technologies able to handle the demands of your business as it grows. This helps you to avoid experiencing significant performance issues.

Evaluate the scalability and performance of different technologies by checking the following benchmarks:

• the number of requests they can handle at once
• the speed at which they can process those requests
• the resources required to process those requests

5. Integration and Extensibility

As your SaaS business is likely to evolve over time, you’ll want to choose flexible technologies. You need them to adapt to any business challenge.

Look for technologies that have APIs or integration points that allow you to connect with other systems and services. Consider the technologies that can be extended or customized. For instance, the integration with third-party tools and services.

6. Cost and Maintenance

There are 2 types of costs:

• the upfront cost of implementing the technologies
• the ongoing cost of maintenance and support

When evaluating the cost of different technologies, consider factors such as:

• the cost of licenses or subscriptions
• the cost of hosting and infrastructure
• the cost of hiring developers with the necessary skills

Add on top of this the ongoing maintenance and support costs. It is the time and resources required to keep the technologies working and up-to-date.

7. Security and Data Privacy

Another critical aspect of a SAAS business is security and data privacy. The technologies must protect against known security threats like hacking or data breaches. Also, they need to be compliant with relevant data privacy regulations, such as GDPR.

When evaluating the security and data privacy of different technologies, consider these factors:

• the security measures built into the technologies
• the track record of the technologies’ security vulnerabilities
• the resources and support available for addressing security issues

Test it

Setting up and comparing different stacks still takes time but getting each one running shouldn’t. Before committing to a tech stack, you want to run it, not just read about it.

GWS CLI gives you two ways to do that.

If you’re starting from scratch, our GitHub templates let you spin up a working environment for different stacks in minutes with no configuration, no infrastructure setup. Pick a stack, run it, see how it feels in practice.

If you already have a project, gws init analyzes your repo and gws up starts the full stack locally: frontend, backend, database, all services running production-identical. One command replaces your entire setup process. Either way, you spend your time evaluating the stack itself, not fighting to get it running.

Get started at getwebstack.com