Like many developers, I always wanted to build my own small SaaS app, which can be an additional source of earnings. Two years ago I created MVP based on Firebase, GCP, and Angular. Each month I do some updates and add new features. Now more than 800 teams use my app on regular basis and I want to share my experience with used technologies.
First of all, I want to say, it’s not a comparison between different web platforms. There are lots of articles about them. My article is more like a retrospective in the format “Pros” and “Cons” after 2 years as I launched Methodist.io.
The topics to be covered:
- Storing data in Database
- User authentication
- SEO and Server Side Rendering
- Documentation
- Libraries and SDK
- Back-end
Storing Data in Database
Databases in Firebase are the most discussed topics. Because they have really a lot of pros and cons.
Firebase has 2 types of DBs:
- Realtime database
- Cloud Firestore
One of the most significant differences between them is pricing.
1-st DB billing based on traffic, 2-nd DB — depends on the number of reads/writes. It’s very important to clearly understand when and what you should use. Because developing an online game or chat with Cloud Firestore is a huge mistake and wasting of your money, but with a Realtime database, it will be very cheap, maybe even for free.
#saas #firebase #technology #startup
