3 SaaS Boilerplate features that speed up development

Saving time while maintaining quality? That’s progress. Almost every digital product, especially SaaS, shares a couple of common elements. Logins, user management and authentication, emails to users, payments and subscriptions.

First weeks of most projects are almost exclusively dedicated to developing those foundations. But why not just paste high quality code in and… move along in a day or two?

The Apptension SaaS Boilerplate is just that. A simple, yet opinionated tool that gets you to start your digital product development straight from Sprint 3.

Below is a breakdown of three of its features - and why your development team will love that they never have to develop the same feature from scratch again.

User authentication and login

Potential time savings: from 1-2 full Sprints to 3-4 days

Our experience with digital services starts off almost always the same. You put in your user credentials - a login, a password or some other form of verifying who you are.

This setup takes time, despite its cookie-cutter nature in the vast majority of cases. Yet we still see development teams coding those features for no good reason all over again.

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SaaS Boilerplate shows why this approach belongs to the past. There is so much you don’t have to code anymore. Just to give you some examples:

• forms and their implementation
• out of the box social authentication
• access tokens
• password creation and reset
• terms and conditions page
  

All come as pre-package code, ready to be used multiple times with the shortest of learning curves.

Subscriptions and Payments

Potential time savings: from 3+ full Sprints to 1 Sprint 

What stands out in coding subscriptions is the number of edge cases you have to think of. There are trials that just end, and those who move to a paid plan.

Some credit cards won’t work for some users, so they need another chance. Admins need to refund users manually, as well as set up automatic refund rules. How about recurring payments and plan changes?

Setting those up manually takes ages - that is, sometimes 2-3 whole sprints for a developer or a team. However, the added value of your business lies elsewhere, and that’s where the focus should be.

SaaS Boilerplate allows to comfortably pack such a spacious feature set into a couple of days, and what is left is styling and business logic implementation.

To sum up, you save time thanks to using ready-to-go, Apptension quality pieces of code which your team would have to write anyway:

• Credit card support (adding, removing, etc.)
• Free trials
• Plan changes
• Recurring and one-time payments
• Automatic and manual refunds
• Change, manage and cancel plans
• Payment history
• Stripe support
• ...and more!
  

With all that in hand, you have much more time to focus on what the users are actually paying for.

Emails

Potential time savings: from several hours to 10s of minutes per email template

Some communication with your users can be done in-product, but a lot of it is going to have to go through classic emails. Trust us - developers do not like to build those. Email clients like MS Outlook still have issues supporting modern styling and HTML.

Not only is it just as fascinating as drying paint after your third go-around, but also makes developers use outdated, rarely used technologies, like styling in tables.

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In turn, this makes business owners reluctant to push for costly upgrades, which luckily, are built into SaaS Boilerplate. Creating email templates in React, which the Boilerplate allows, gives your team much more freedom in communicating with your users.

Here is a severely incomplete list of Email related functions:

• A set of ready-to-send transactional emails (new user verification, password recovery, subscription renewals, errors, etc.)
• Ability to schedule emails at a given time
• Content management and sender alias configuration
• Bespoke emails creator
• Sending test emails directly from a Storybook
• Internationalization support out of the box

We save time for our clients using the same proven, and frequently updated technology that is in SaaS Boilerplate. Now you can do it too!