Starting a SaaS project often feels easier than it actually is.
Authentication, routing, payments, database setup — none of these problems are new. Yet they are rebuilt again and again, usually under time pressure, and often without a clear long-term structure.
Over time, we noticed that most early-stage SaaS friction doesn’t come from product ideas.
It comes from weak foundations.
Speed first, clarity later
Many SaaS starters optimize for one thing: speed.
They help you ship a demo quickly, which is useful in the very beginning. But once real constraints appear — billing edge cases, data consistency, compliance, long-term maintenance — the architecture often starts to fight back.
At that point, teams pay the price of decisions that were postponed or hidden behind abstractions.
We wanted to explore a different trade-off.
Reducing cognitive overhead, not just setup time
Instead of asking “How fast can we ship something?”, we asked:
How can we reduce cognitive overhead while keeping the system understandable months later?
That question changed everything.
Rather than stacking features or shortcuts, we focused on:
- clear routing and data flows
- explicit architectural boundaries
- predictable patterns over clever abstractions
The goal wasn’t maximum flexibility.
It was long-term clarity.
Opinionated foundations are unavoidable
A SaaS foundation can’t be neutral.
Avoiding decisions early usually means making harder ones later, when the system is already in motion. Being opinionated upfront helps reduce decision fatigue and keeps the mental model stable as the product grows.
That’s why our approach is intentionally opinionated — not to restrict developers, but to give them a clear baseline they can trust and extend.
Real-world constraints matter early
In practice, production SaaS projects face constraints very quickly: payments, operational requirements, and regulatory considerations are rarely optional.
Treating these as afterthoughts often leads to rewrites or fragile patches. We believe they should be treated as first-class concerns from the start, not bolted on later.
A foundation should disappear
A good foundation shouldn’t be impressive.
If developers spend less time thinking about setup decisions and more time building what actually differentiates their product, then the foundation is doing its job.
That’s the mindset behind why we built our own foundation instead of relying on yet another starter.
We’re sharing this perspective to exchange ideas, not to promote anything.
Curious to hear how others approach early SaaS architecture and where they’ve felt the most friction.
Top comments (0)