Introducing SaaSykit: A Laravel Boilerplate for Building SaaS Applications
I started building side projects a few years ago and I realized something: I was spending a lot of time building the same features over and over again, and these features were not the core of my projects, they were just the basic features needed to operate any SaaS or website that offers products to customers.
Things like integrating payment providers, handling webhooks, sending emails, building blocks of a web page, customer dashboard, blog & SEO features, etc.
I realized that I was not the only one doing this, and that many solopreneurs and small teams were doing the same thing, spending a lot of time building the same features over and over again, and that's why I started SaaSykit, to make it easier for myself and others to build and operate SaaS websites.
I'm not sure if you already know, but 95% of startups fail, so I believe that startup founders should try their luck many times before having a good chance of reaching success.
Speaking in terms of numbers, if 95% of startups fail, a founder has to try 20 times to have a higher probability of success. This means starting from scratch 20 times, and building the same features 20 times, and that's what I want to avoid.
I, as a developer, should have the ability to have everything I need to operate a SaaS in a couple of days, and focus mainly on implementing the core features of my application, and that's what SaaSykit is all about.
What is SaaSykit?
SaaSykit is laravel-based SaaS boilerplate that comes with all the features needed to operate a SaaS or website that offers one-time purchase products to customers. So whether you want to offer a subscription-based service, a one-time product, or a combination of both, SaaSykit has you covered.
Considering that I'm a solo developer, I've built SaaSykit with the idea of saving time and effort, allowing customers to server themselves when it comes to basic things like changing subscription plans, cancelling subscriptions, updating their payment methods, etc from a beautiful customer dashboard.
Technologies used
SaaSykit builds on the shoulders of giants, like the beloved Laravel framework with the TALL stack (Tailwind, AlpineJS, Livewire, Laravel) in addition to FilamentPHP for the admin panel & customer dashboard and DaisyUI for the TailwindCSS components.
Features of SaaSykit
Subscription/One-time Product, Plans & Pricing
As a software provider, I don't want to think too much when I want to offer a new product or plan. Using the admin panel, I should be able to create and manage my products, add their features, plans, and pricing. These products should be created automatically for me on the payment provider's side (no manual creation and manual config adjustments required by myself), and that's what SaaSykit does.
And with a one line of code I should be able to display them on the frontend of my website:<x-plans.all calculate-saving-rates="true" preselected-interval="year"></x-plans.all>
Integrations with payment providers
SaaSykit offers integration with multiple payment providers like Stripe, Paddle, and Lemon Squeezy. I as a developer should be able to choose the payment provider I want to offer to my customers from the admin panel.
Discounts
I should be able to create and manage my discounts and reward my customers. The process of creating discounts should be easy and straightforward and also happen in the admin panel.
I should also be able to limit the number of redemption of a discount code, and also limit the duration of the discount code and pick which products the discount code applies to.
Beautiful checkout process
Customers should be able to go through a slick checkout process, that allows them to see details of the product they are about to purchase, and also be able to apply a discount code if they have one.
They also can choose the payment provider they want to pay through from the payment providers that I have enabled from the admin panel.
Beautiful admin panel & customer dashboard
I should be able to manage my SaaS application from a simple & extensible admin panel (powered by Filament). This includes managing my products, customers, discounts, general settings, users, roles, and permissions, blog and much more.
Customers should not be left in the dark as well. They should be able to manage their subscriptions, change payment method, upgrade plan, cancel subscription, see their orders & billing information, and more from a beautiful user dashboard (powered by Filament).
Customize Styles & branding
SaaSykit allows you to customize the styles & colors to match your branding. You can easily pick the primary & secondary colors (defined in TailwindCSS config file) and that will be reflected across all the web pages of your application.
SaaSykit comes also with a beautiful error page that you can customize to fit your brand.
Huge list of ready-to-use components
SaaSykit comes with a huge list of ready-to-use components that you can use to build your web pages. Building web pages for your application should require minimum time and a huge set of Components like Plans & Pricing, hero section, features section, testimonials, FAQ, Call to action, tab slider, and much more are be available for you to use.
Check out the documentation to see the full list of components.
User Authentication & Social Login
SaaSykit comes with user authentication out of the box (based & refined from the Laravel auth system), whether classic email/password or social login (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, LinkedIn, and more).
Social login can be enabled/disabled & configured from the admin panel.
User & Role Management
The admin panel gives you ability to create and manage your users and roles, and assign permissions to your users in case you want to expand your team and allow them to administer parts of your application.
You can also block users, and reset their password from the admin panel.
Email sending & templates
SaaSykit comes with email sending out of the box, and you can choose from multiple email providers like Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES, Brevo and more coming soon.
If you had the chance to work with email templates before, you know how painful it is to create and make sure they look good on all email clients (Yes, you should use HTML tables to style them in this day and age :/ ). SaaSykit comes with a beautiful email template, already style that you can use to send emails to your customers, which you can customize its colors to fit your brand.
Default emails like "welcome email", "password reset", "email verification", "user subscribed", "subscription cancelled", "invoice payment failed", and "user ordered" come built-in in SaaSykit.
Blog & SEO
SEO is important for any website to be found on the internet and to rank high in search engines. I, like any developer, have made the mistake of ignoring SEO before, basically because it takes some time to build a blogging system for my apps (and to write the blogs posts too), time that I thought would be better invested adding more features to my application. But what's the value of building more features if no one can find your application? That's why I decided to include a blogging system in SaaSykit and take SEO seriously.
SaaSykit comes with a simple yet powerful blogging system that you can use to create and manage your blog posts using a WYSIWYG rich editor from the admin panel.
Your blogs will be SEO optimized out of the box, and included automatically into the sitemap of your application and will be displayed in a beautiful blog page on your website.
SaaS Metrics & Stats
SaaSykit's comprehensive stats dashboard offers a simple and visually appealing interface, allowing you to effortlessly monitor and analyze crucial SaaS metrics that are important in assessing the overall health and performance of your business. Among the key metrics featured on the dashboard are Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Churn Rates, and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and more.
Developer-friendly & Automated Tests
SaaSykit is a thin layer on top of Laravel, and it's built with developers in mind. If you're familiar with Laravel, you'll feel right at home with SaaSykit.
We use the same Laravel project structure, and the Laravel standards and best practices are followed throughout the codebase.
In addition, SaaSykit comes with automated tests for critical components of the application, so you can be sure that your application is working as expected. These automated tests will always be updated and expanded as new features are added to SaaSykit.
One-Command Deployment
Since the main goal of SaaSykit is to save time and effort, I've integrated Deployer into SaaSykit, so you can provision your server and deploy your application easily with a single command (if you prefer).
Deployer offer no-downtime deployment, and it's easy to use and configure and I personally had a great experience using it in my projects.
Once you are ready to deploy your application to production, just get a cloud or VPS instance from a cloud provider like Hetzner or DigitalOcean, follow provisioning & deployment docs and your application will be up and running in a couple of minutes.
Future of SaaSykit
SaaSykit is a living project, and I'm committed to adding new features and updates to it. The main focus will be on automation and integrations with other systems plus adding more UI components and themes to the frontend of the application to appeal to a wider UI/UX audience tastes.
Up next is the integration with Lemon Squeezy as it's a highly requested feature, and there is already a list of features that are coming soon. I will be publishing the roadmap of SaaSykit publicly for everyone to see and suggest new features and vote on the features they want to see in SaaSykit in the future.
In case you wanna dig more into the details of SaaSykit, you can check the documentation and the demo to see the application in action.
Happy building! 🚀
