Building your own MERN SaaS Product? Read this first

If you are a MERN developer, building a SaaS application and deploying it is probably your dream project. However, a lot of developers are confused regarding general best practices and what points to keep in mind while working on a SaaS project. This article will help you understand everything related to building a SaaS project.

SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which means you develop some web services and make them available to users, setting some usage quota, some pricing, etc. A SaaS can be some service delivering analytics for Websites based on their traffic data, or maybe a service to process images, convert one file type to another, or generate some random mock data for testing, etc.

So let's try to learn and understand what are the points to keep in mind while building a SaaS service.

1. Just MERN Stack?

MERN stack refers to MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS, and NodeJS, and this is enough if you want to develop a basic application with frontend and backend, and also if you want to develop an API to offer as part of your SaaS product. But apart from this, you must learn how to use cache services like Redis and how you can use it with NodeJS because our backend will be written using JavaScript.

Then you should also learn how you can use a Payment gateway in case you wish to make your service paid. You should also explore how and when you should use queue services. For example, if you have to send emails to your clients then you can use a queue service for it. How can you containerize your application, or how can you use docker in your application, all these questions you should ask yourself before starting the development.

What other services you may have to explore depends on your SaaS use case.

2. Scalability is the Key

System design plays a crucial role. When you are building a SaaS that you are serious about and want to build into a successful business then you must spend time figuring out the Database architecture, Server architecture, code structure, etc. because these things are very difficult to change in the later stages.

Sometimes, when you start building a product scalability is not something that you are concerned about, but that is the biggest mistake. You must explore:

1. Whether you want to go with Monolithic architecture or Microservices architecture?

2. How will you set up load balancing for your service?

3. Do you need a CDN service? If yes, for what?

4. How will you manage scaling? Horizontal scaling or Vertical scaling?

5. Do you need a single instance of database or having multiple DB servers would be best for you?

6. If your SAAS is all about some computational task, image or video processing, etc. which may be time-consuming, then you must plan to implement asynchronous behavior.

7. You should explore the stateless architecture and see if it fits your needs or not.

3. What about Security?

Scalability is one thing, security is another. You must follow strict security rules from day one. While writing the code for your SaaS service, you must use proper validations, strict type checking, encrypting sensitive data, authentication, authorization, etc. to set up proper security during the development process.

While deploying the application, you must always use a proper CA-signed SSL certificate to enable HTTPS for your server. You should also consider having a security layer in front of your main server, either using a reverse proxy or by using services like Cloudflare, etc.

4. User Experience is Important

If your SaaS service will have a user interface be it the dashboard for your clients to manage and configure your service or the homepage of your SaaS product, you must always make the UI simple so that it is easier for the end user to understand how to use your service.

The user interface should be intuitive, visually appealing, fast, responsive, and above all easy to use.

Once the service is built you will realize the importance of UX when you will have to wear the hat of a Business developer to market and grow your SaaS business, if you want to turn your SaaS product into a successful business.

Building a SaaS product is one thing, and turning it into a business is a completely different game. You should consider doing some entrepreneurship courses or maybe a distance college program, like Lamar University entrepreneurship degree to understand how you can become an entrepreneur.

5. API Design

API design is very important. Yes, you will be using ExpressJS for this but you must always follow standard practices while doing so. You must design RESTFul services and use standard request types, response status, etc. so that it is easier for developers to use your APIs.

You can also evaluate if your use case requires GraphQL for easier and faster data querying.

6. Which Database?

There are so many different types of databases available and it depends on you and your use case which database you should pick. You can go with RDBMS like MySQL, etc. if you have to save related data in your database like user information, authentication, information, etc.

You can also go with MongoDB which is used in the MERN stack, if you have unstructured data. You can also have multiple databases in your architecture, to store different types of data in different databases.

If you are using RDBMS, then you must learn the basics of DBMS, and SQL queries.

7. Performance - Can't do without it

Once you have developed a basic version of your service, you must start testing it for performance, so that you can make corrections in your development phase to improve the performance of your application.

You should explore and implement techniques like lazy loading, caching, server-side rendering, code splitting, etc.

You may want to,

1. Combine related API calls to reduce HTTP request and response overheads.

2. Have proper indexes in the database, write fast queries, partition large tables, deploy the Database on a separate server for performance, etc. to improve DB performance.

3. Reduce the number of HTTP calls, move to HTTP/2 for improved performance, have a CDN for static files, follow proper compression techniques like Gzip, etc.

4. Always monitor performance and map it relative to the traffic you receive and with different frontend pages and backend functions too.

8. Proper Unit Testing

You should have the unit testing setup from day one. With MERN stack you can use Jest or Enzyme for setting up your unit testing.

If you follow a test-driven development approach then you will be able to write better structured code, more functional code, and scalable too.

9. Deployment and CI/CD

Deployment should not just be about taking your service online, it is way about setting up the process which should be automated, or if not automated from day 1, can be automated easily.

You should pick the right cloud service for your service, and see how you can set up CI/CD pipelines from your code repository to your production server.

You should also consider having a separate server to run build and test cases for your code repository.

There are many good cloud services that you can explore,

• Heroku

• Vercel

• AWS

• Google Cloud Platform

• Netlify

• Firebase Hosting

10. Ohh! Don't forget the Documentation

Last but not least, document everything properly. It is very important to have proper documentation of the service both for developers and for the client.

The documentation that you develop for the client should have simple language, and more examples so that they are able to understand how you can use the service. You should present some use cases so that the client is able to foresee how they can use your service in their business.