Building SaaS is easy today. Or well.. easy..
Getting it perfect is easier than before, where you would previously build out a complete system in 3 to 5 years, it now takes 2 to 3 months.
Though, how do you sell your SaaS?
Do you use Ads or just try to do as much organic? And how much time took it?
At work I'm using Kubernetes more and more, at first it was quite hard, but slowly its getting easier.
Though, when I haven't looked at the kubernetes stack for a while, I often forget the commands and forget where stuff is.
I'm actually searching for open-source software that I can deploy in the kubernetes stack itself to monitor and do operational work.
Until now I haven't found any decent (open-source) software for it.
Using k9s in the terminal or just kubectl, but thats not it..
Any recommendations?
Last 3 months have been insane. I've discovered and learned a 1000 new things building my own product.
First a little bit of background: Over the past 8 years I've been a freelance software developer & I've worked on my own and in small teams. But one thing that I never did was building my own actual product. I've always been working on building a product for someone else. I would just get my hourly rate and that's it. Bread has to be at the table & a house has to be paid for.
Now with the AI boom, I've got time to work on my ideas. I get energized and I literally work day and night on my SaaS product. Because I also use my own product and whilst I'm working on it, I get to test it and I use it personally everywhere.
But I'm feeling a bit stuck now..
I started of the SaaS using Stripe, but as I want to protect my customers and don't want to share too much information I went for an EU payment provider, Mollie.
Filled in all the details, started moving from Stripe to Mollie (quite some work), and requested:
The first 2 were accepted nearly within a day.
But Mastercard came back with a denial since my SaaS is not in line with their policies.
I asked what specific policies, but I didn't get the details because that would violate their policies.. Weird but ok.
Now, what do I do? How can I still get Mastercard? Or are there other solutions / ways?
My business is built around Zero-Knowledge for the protection for our customers. If we don't have information of what our users store (its a cloud storage platform, EU-based), then we can also never share the information with others or leak it.
And I have the feeling that Mastercard cannot allow that, because it would (as their policies say) 'Stimulate criminal activities'.
I really don't know what to do here...
About a month ago i posted here about backing up 200TB. Most common response was "just tier your data". Fair, been cutting things down. But the whole offsite thing still bugged me, kept hitting walls everywhere i looked. So opening this up properly.
To be upfront: this isn't a launch post and i'm not trying to sell anything. 10+ years of doing this myself and i still don't have it right. Want honest input from people who've been at it longer than i have / know more than me (not everything is age related).
Storage itself is part of the problem. Most affordable providers don't do client-side e2ee, so you trust them with your keys. Anything US-hosted (Backblaze, Wasabi, Glacier) sits under the Cloud Act. EU options either cap out (Hetzner storage box at 40TB, doesn't scale on the go), are SFTP-only without e2ee, or you're back to managing infrastructure yourself.
The workflow on top doesn't work out of the box either. Tried borg, rsync, rclone + rclone crypt, Nextcloud, Hetzner storage box. Lost a few weekends to each. Different setup per machine, rclone crypt's password sits in a config file (obscured, not encrypted), borg needs per-system install with no native mac/iOS client, nextcloud's e2ee is opt-in per folder. When my NAS went down i had zero visibility into what was actually backed up (couldn't reach it = couldn't see anything). Plus the usual questions you don't realize you have until 6 months in: "Is the cronjob still running?" "Did i ever test a restore?" "Where did i save the passphrase 2 years ago?"
So here's what i actually want to ask:
For context, so this isn't all theoretical: right after my post last time, i started building what i wished existed. Doing it with my brother (data engineer), my step-brother (security, his day job), and a friend who breaks every tool you put in his hands. Non-negotiables: data availability above everything (that's the bit i lose sleep over), then end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge (server can't read your data), open-source clients (repos at github.com/beebeeb-io), EU jurisdiction (hosted in NL). 12 words are your recovery, we don't hold them.
First thing got working is a CLI daemon that heartbeats every 60s and on failure we send a push notification to your phone within a minute if backup dies (lost heartbeats over past 5m). Web app + iOS app exist (not released yet). Desktop + Android still in progress. CLI won't scale to NAS-millions-of-files yet, quite hard with complete client-side encryption. Pricing is floating around €10.99/TB/month on current infra right now, honestly higher than i want, margins are thin on existing infra. Long-term plan is own hardware in NL to drop per-TB cost (3-rack Ceph, ~€200k upfront + €30k/yr). If anyone wants to help fund that path, conversation's open.
But honestly, the questions above matter more to me than the build. I'd rather have your real input on the problem than tell you about my attempt at a solution.
If you want to chat or test things, DM me, would love to. If you want to know when this is ready, beebeeb.io keeps a list (one launch email, no spam). But the comments below are honestly what i'm here for.
So i’ve got about 200TB in my homelab (proxmox + truenas VM, nothing fancy) and i keep putting off the offsite question. Right now my “strategy” is a keep by most important data seperately on a disk at my brothers place. Which is basically nothing.
The thing is, if my house catches fire tomorrow, everything’s gone. And the more data i accumulate the more this bugs me.
Looked into the obvious stuff but nothing really fits:
- backblaze/wasabi at this scale is just insane money. like i’m not paying $1k+/month for a hobby
- hetzner storage box is cheap but it’s sftp only and i don’t control the encryption. Could use rclone but ye.. their limit is also 40TB..
- i thought about just dropping a NAS at my brother’s place but then i’m managing two systems + current prices are insane for hw...
What i’d actually want is pretty simple. Just some dumb storage somewhere in the EU where i push encrypted blobs to, which is also not so costly... Feels like it should but i can’t find it.
Curious what others at this scale are doing. Especially in europe since i’d rather not clone everything to US with whatever happens in the world right now.