Six month ago, I started working on monse.app, a simple and automated personal finances for normal people.
I'm a solo maker and I want to build this SaaS faster but also, making a good product that I can scale and work on in the future.
With that in mind, this is the stack that I choose, what do you think?
I found that AWS, and particularly SES, it's simple and cheap to send some transactional emails. I tried SendinBlue and other similar, but I think that SES it's better for this. Maybe in the future I can move all the server and storage from DO to AWS. It's not a bad idea.
About Plausible, I like it, but right now I don't want to add another paid service, possibly in the future.
Maybe in the future I can move all the server and storage from DO to AWS. It's not a bad idea.
It makes sense to me.
About Plausible, I like it, but right now I don't want to add another paid service, possibly in the future.
Completely understood. Maybe you could think about not tracking the users at all.
Thanks! My idea with monse it's to share all metrics possible, I'm working on it 😉
Hola Víctor!
Your app looks very promising! :)
What exactly made you choose Laravel as a backend for your software? I created everything with PHP some years ago but since I got into serious javascript development, I ditched everything for nodeJS. Especially the ability to render my frontend components as well on serverside made me leave PHP rather quickly.
I LOVE your finance data sources - thanks for listing them! My team works on the finance data section of germanies biggest news website and I dropped the coingecko API in our Slack channel. Lets see what the team says by tomorrow :)
About your hosting: I was using DigitalOcean since recently, too. I switched to Hetzner since their pricing is cheaper (and its a European Provider, you know GDPR and stuff) - and I must admit, their dashboard is at least as good as DigitalOceans'.
By the way, their traffic cost is MUCH cheaper than with DO. And you get cheaper file hosting, too if you need it.
I removed Google Analytics from all my personal web projects. According to european law its illegal to transfer personal data into the US, what GA does. I switched to plausible.io and am really happy with it (costs money, tough).
I wish you good look with your app, I really like it! If you happen to live in the Barcelona area we can maybe meet some day for a beer and talk a bit about web development! :)
Thanks! I think I have to eliminate Google Analytics as soon as possible, the truth is that I practically don't use it.
About Laravel, I feel very comfortable with it and I really enjoy using it. I thought about doing the backend with javascript, but I don't feel so comfortable with it. In the end it depends a bit on your background.
Yeah, it was the same for me. The data which plausible collects is totally fine for me (how many visitors on which URL, maybe some custom events).
You should give them a try - its 2 month for free. And if you like it but don't want to pay, there is a free self hosted option: plausible.io/docs/
Check out Postmark for transactional emails. SES works well but requires a lot of configuration to get working correctly to receive bounce notifications, spam reports, etc. Postmark is inexpensive and a much simpler solution for a small team.
Yes, it's a bit complicated, the first time. I have used it before, and I know how to configure it. 😊
Well done mate!!
Also, what about the privacy issues? Why should I trust this application with my private financial data?
We are usign the API that your bank provide, so it's totally secure. We don't store any password or critical information. Also, we can do any kind of action in your bank, we just have read permissions, nothing else.
I'd assume all your clients have separate instances but still use the same application. I'd call that Multi-tenancy even though it's on a Single Database, no?
But, that's not multi-tenancy, that is a user system where every user has his own profile, data and more. Like Twitter, Facebook, and a lot of other applications.
Looks pretty good. Two ideas:
I recently posted about our tech stack, too.