It’s surprisingly hard to settle on a “fit-for-purpose” technology and tool stack for a modern SaaS / Cloud app.
First of all, there are the technical decisions:
🔀 Which frontend, backend, and persistence stack do you use? Angular vs. React, Java vs. Python, Spring Boot vs. Rails vs. Django vs. Flask, MongoDB vs. Firebase vs. MySQL vs. Postgres…
🔀 Do you run it on AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google Cloud), or Azure (Microsoft)?
🔀 How do you handle build, deployment, automated testing, monitoring, and observability?
But then there’s also a myriad of options on the next level up in the tech stack:
🔀 Usage tracking and analytics: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Hotjar, …?
🔀 Onboarding, product tours, and user guidance: Appcues, UserPilot, WalkMe, …?
🔀 Support and CRM: HubSpot, Zendesk, …?
🔀 User feedback and surveys: Google Forms, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, UserVoice, …?
🔀 Subscriptions and entitlements: Chargebee, Zuora, Recurly, …?
🔀 Feature flagging: LaunchDarkly, Flagsmith, Codemagic, Unleash, …
Alas, one could spend months researching, comparing, evaluating, and testing all of these—and many combinations of them—let alone the “all-in-one platforms” like Pendo or Intercom that cover many (but not all) of these categories. On the other hand, none of these tools do any rocket science, and you could build the minimum level of features they provide yourself. So, when do you “make” vs. “buy”?
For poketto.me, I’ve settled on a pragmatic approach: Everything I can confidently build myself in less than a day, I’ll build myself. But I’ll build it in such a way that I can swap it out for a proper external tool at some point. All else? Use an external tool—ideally one with a “start free” pricing plan and a clean API that allows for easy migration if and when the need arises.
To give you a few examples:
➡️ Feature flagging and entitlements: Home-grown, but can be migrated to something else quite easily
➡️ Usage tracking: Google Analytics for now
➡️ User feedback and marketing automation: None of the above – currently, I’m sending the occasional feature update newsletter from my personal email account