My current project is the culmination 15 years of software development.
I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js).
Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend.
Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount of traction in the early days.
At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I had been working on it for several years by that point. I just made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility with Socket.io but it had some additional features.
A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including indexing with a million records).
I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience, carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types. String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3 types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation. Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and produce a working, stable, bug-free solution.
That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some popular well funded solutions on the market which look superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale, require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects.
> I've been struggling to sell it ... they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects.
I do not think that it's your competitors' pretty one-shotted UIs that are losing you your leads. FWIW your website:
* Does not explain the benefits nor the feature-set of what your platform offers
* Has a Docs page which seems to be a link to 6 sets of reference APIs (or similar) in disparate Github pages - that's worse than most open source products.
* Uses cute animated characters which does not give off the "we are a serious enterprise and you can rely on us" vibe
* Has a novel pricing scheme ("implements a techno-feudalist pricing model") that requires a 4 paragraph explanation and somehow tries to frame introducing additional uncertainty for potential buyers as a feature (it's a good thing that _my_ pricing tiers could be adjusted by other customers' votes!?)
* Additionally prominently features cryptocurrency in the topnav, which is for many people a yellow or red flag (regardless of what seems to be your good intentions behind it)
Doesn't have any demo apps I can click around in to smoke test the platform's functionality, let alone fiddle with the backend
* Has almost zero information on basic business-y compliance-y things - no info on security, availability, SSO support, etc let alone more hardcore things like compliance standards your platform meets.
Thanks for the feedback. The part about the voting aspect of the pricing model is a good point. I will remove this and try to use a bit more conventional language whilst maintaining a kind of exclusive licence model.
Also I'll try to explain like "Estimated to be X times faster to develop and requires 70% fewer tokens than alternative stacks and easier to configure security."
That's actually realistic based on some recent analysis I did. I didn't have this info before.
Saasufy itself isn't open source. I'm planning to sell licenses of the code (a limited number of them to make it scarce). SocketCluster is a core component of Saasufy. The goal did evolve slightly; originally, it was to make it easier to build full stack applications. Now it actually lets you build entire full stack apps without code. That bigger goal has been achieved. I have some videos linked from the Docs page showing how it works.
But yes, I'm a bit paranoid about my situation. I do feel like my work is suppressed by algorithms. Things feel very different for me now than they did before in terms of finding users. It's really hard to find people to try my work. Difficult even to convince them to watch a 10 minute video. Though I guess many people are in the same boat right?
That makes more sense but I don't see what pub/sub has to do with a no-code full-stack framework. Other than that some of them might want a chat widget?
It's real-time by default. Done in a cheap (and efficient) way. The views update automatically when relevant data changes, no possibility of overriding conflicts when editing concurrently. Changes are only distributed to users/clients who are looking at the affected data.
It's not just for chat. Anytime people update data collaboratively, for any data-driven software, you run into issues of people overwriting each other's changes... Sadly users got really used to poor experiences like having to 'refresh the page', or 'locking down resources' during edits to avoid concurrent editing altogether.
It's been kind of disturbing for me to realize how few people care about data integrity in collaborative scenarios. It's a kind of hidden issue which can cause major problems but users tend to tolerate. I've had this experience first-hand with colleagues using various other platforms where someone else had the same resource open for a while in the browser, we updated different fields and my field was overwritten with its old value but we didn't realise for some time until it caused a bug with one of the workflows. Then it was like "I'm sure I updated that value."
SC's pub/sub channels are part of the secret sauce to make this work. SocketCluster makes some unique tradeoffs with its pub/sub mechanism; the channels are extremely cheap to create and are cleaned up automatically (and cheaply)... And at any scale with sharding. This was an intentional design decision which is different from message queues like Kafka and RabbitMQ which prioritise throughput and are typically used in the backend as opposed to being end-to-end.
I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js).
Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend.
Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount of traction in the early days.
At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I had been working on it for several years by that point. I just made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility with Socket.io but it had some additional features.
A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including indexing with a million records).
I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience, carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types. String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3 types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation. Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and produce a working, stable, bug-free solution.
That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some popular well funded solutions on the market which look superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale, require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects.
You can check out https://saasufy.com/ if interested.