wooodhead/minimum-viable-saas

A multi-tier membership SaaS in less than 500 lines of code w/Stripe and Firebase

Minimum Viable SaaS

A feature-complete membership app in less than ~400 lines of code.

Built with

• Next.js
• Firebase Auth
• Firebase Firestore
• Firebase Stripe Extension
• Stripe Customer Portal
• Tailwind

Features

• Login/Logout
• 2 product tiers (Basic and Premium) with 2 price plans each (monthly and yearly)
• Subscription management, card management, and plan cancellation via Stripe Customer Portal
• Basic-only content
• Premium-only content

Background

I saw a tweet about a new Firebase Firestore Extension for Stripe's new customer billing portal. This new portal lets end-users change plans and update their billing info via stripe.com instead of in your app--saving you thousands of lines of UI code and headaches.

Anyways, after seeing this, I had to see just how many lines it code it would take to build a minimally viable membership/saas site.

Turns out it takes less than 300-400 lines of code. It took me around 2 hours to figure this all out, but that's because I semi-forgot how Firebase worked (hint: subscriptions).

Most of the code comes straight from the next-firebase-authentication Next.js example. After that it's almost entirely ripped from the Stripe sample.

While I'm still not a fan of Firebase, I think this setup is by far the fewest possible lines of code required to get $$$$ selling some software as a service.