Low-Code Solutions for Building Basic SaaS Features
Nowadays, you can easily build a new business using a SaaS application and seize opportunities in new emerging markets. Various SaaS applications serve different purposes and for different kinds of users or target users.
To build a SaaS application, you need to have experience in software or web development or hire a software engineer, which can be very expensive. It is best to hire if the application is complex or if you don’t have the needed experience.
However, if you want to do it yourself, one way is learning how to code. This is a slow process. It takes months before you can even grasp concepts and build a basic app. The second option is to use no-code, low-code, or visual programming solutions.
If you are a developer and you want to get things done faster, you can also use low-code solutions, which will speed up the development process.
Basic SaaS Features
Authentication and Authorization
In every basic SaaS application, authentication and authorization are two key features that need to be available, especially if it’s a web application.
In most standard applications, users need to create an account and log in anytime they want to use it. This helps the application serve them better by saving their progress, keeping a record of everything carried out on the app, or customizing the app based on their profile, settings, and usage.
Let’s say our web application is a note-taking app. Users need to create an account and log in to save their notes and retrieve them anytime they need them.
To enable authentication on your application, users need to be able to create an account using a username/email and password. Then, authorization is required if you want to limit what a particular user can access.
User and Role Management
User management is how administrators manage users on their platform — it gives them visibility of users on their platform. Managing users and their roles is very important in an application. Users should be able to access only what they are required to.
Having two types of users with different roles in an application helps you manage the different features and access each type of user needs.
Subscription and Payments
To keep the services running and pay for the resources used in the application, you need to accept some form of payment.
There are many ways to add payments to your application. However, you will need to figure out which country your target users reside in and their method of payment — you need to integrate a payment gateway that can accept most payment methods for your target users.
There are tons of payment gateways these days, which makes it easier for you to integrate a payment system on your application and accept payments easily. Some gateways make it easier by providing Checkout UI, Payment SDK, and payment buttons to make the process easier.
Webhooks and Events
When building a SaaS application that deals with a lot of asynchronous data from different external services, you need to find a way to listen and react when something happens in the system.
Webhooks and events allow you to listen to all the events in the system and react to them. For example, let’s say we want to be able to generate custom invoices for user payments. We’ll need to listen to Stripe events to know when the user pays and generate a custom invoice for the user.
Once the invoice is generated, we’ll want to be notified of this and automate sending the invoice to their email.
Admin Panel/Dashboard
To manage your application users, payments, and subscriptions, you will need an admin panel. With your admin access, you need to be able to:
- See user information
- Update user information
- Ban, deactivate, or delete user information
- See all their payments and subscriptions
- See their usage and activities
This will give you better insight into who your users are and how they are using your platform.
Your admin panel can have features to give discounts/bonuses to users, refund users, manage payments, and so on.
Solutions
So far, we have looked at some basic SaaS features. Now let’s look at their solutions.
Frontegg
Frontegg is a user management platform that lets you embed a drop-in authentication, authorization, user, and role management at a go. And you don’t have to write any code. It provides all the building blocks to add authentication and user management to your application. It gives you the self-service admin experience with a multi-tenant feature to manage all your users, their roles and permissions, payments, and subscriptions in different applications.
Out of the box, Frontegg will let you set pricing for your users. Your users can choose subscription plans, change plans, and automate renewal. Frontegg provides a way to listen to all the events happening in your system. The best advantage of Frontegg is you don’t need to write any code to implement it. You can just embed it in your admin interface — you can also get started for free to test their most popular features at a smaller scale.
Zapier
Zapier is an automation platform that lets you create zaps with webhooks and react to the incoming data payload. With Zapier, you can handle the whole application background operations using its large arrays of integrations. This includes the database, emails, HTTP requests, and so on.
It is a very useful product if your app involves some automation in dynamic forms, payments, and subscriptions. If your app interacts with lots of external services that have already been integrated with Zapier, you can easily use Zapier to communicate.
Auth0
Auth0 is simply an authentication and authorization platform that can be added to any application to enable auth services. It provides the building blocks for developers to build on authentication services into their applications. With Auth0, you still need to perform a significant amount of coding to make it work seamlessly in your application. Therefore, it is ideal for developers who don’t want to waste time building auth from scratch.
Retool
Retool is a simple drag and drop platform that helps you build internal tools and dynamic dashboards and connect them to your databases, APIs, and other services like Google Cloud Platforms services. Retool also lets you write custom SQL queries and Javascript so you can interact with data and handle the app interactions.
With Retool, you can build a custom dashboard that shows all your users in your database and lets you update your users’ roles directly from the dashboard. However, you still need to write some code at the frontend app to handle the app interaction. You will also need to design the app and connect it to the database using the UI toolkit.
Stripe
Stripe provides you with out-of-the-box tools to easily accept payments on your application and customize the checkout UI and payment button without writing a single line of code. So if you are not a developer, you can still integrate Stripe on your application by just embedding the payment buttons and checkout on your application.
Stripe also lets you manage your user subscriptions. If you are offering a subscription pricing model, you can use Stripe to easily manage all your users’ subscriptions and give access to the right people.
Stripe also lets you create coupon codes so you can give discounts to your users anytime.
Conclusion
I wish we could explore more solutions as there are tons of low-code solutions that provide various benefits. Your choice of solution should depend on your usage — what works best for you and lets you achieve your app goals.
