[1] https://x.com/andrewculver/status/1297575768520716288/photo/...

I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!

When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!

These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.

If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! https://railssaas.com

Happy to answer any questions anyone may have!

I disagree that Bullet Train is "really overpriced". The features it provides to customers can save them hundreds of hours of development time in total. There are individual features in Bullet Train (the teams functionality, the Stripe integration, outbound webhooks, scaffolding real-time chat conversation threads onto models and an inbox for all of them, Zapier integration, just to name a few) that would each save most development teams at least $1,450 in development costs, and that's before you take into account the power of Super Scaffolding for code generation.

Bullet Train will save most development teams months in effort right off the bat. That's well worth $1,450 to the customers who have been able to get to market faster with components they know are being used and maintained across many different products. Bullet Train is only two years old, and there are already folks running seven-figure businesses around products that cost five-figures to build using Bullet Train. I'm not trying to imply it's magic, I'm just trying to point out that there are situations where $1,450 can be a no-brainer.

I love that you're starting with an open source base. If I knew when I started what I now know after two years of selling Bullet Train, I would probably do something similar. But you will need (as I've needed and as others who are doing similar projects have needed) help along the way. (For example, you'll definitely want to get the support of a designer.) Unless you want to bring those people on as partners, that help will cost you money, sometimes lots of it, so make sure you're charging enough for your premium components to pay for the help you need to make the product a success and the best it can be.

Best of luck! Wishing you a lot of success!

On the development side, I still think Rails is an excellent choice, but I also felt a lot of the same pain you're expressing, but instead of with server configuration, I started feeling it more specifically with the redundancy of putting together the same libraries over and over for each app.

To try to revive the joy of creating new projects, I created Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co), which I describe as "Rails on Rails". It's an app template with authentication (Devise), authorization (CanCanCan), subscriptions (Koudoku), teams, invitations, OAuth integrations, etc. all wrapped in a consistent theme with a full feature-level test suite.

It also has a powerful code generation/scaffolding engine for pumping out CRUD views and controllers for the web, API endpoints, API documentation, and soon it'll handle your Zapier integration as well. (Posted a demo video of this here at https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/934251715175395328) It also has a thin layer of conventions on top of vanilla Rails, like namespacing the public vs. account sections of an app. It's stuff that most of us were doing previously, just slightly different from app to app, and this is an attempt to standardize so we can build other magic on top of it.

As a demo, a few months ago I used Bullet Train + Heroku to build and launch a simple Trello clone in two hours: https://bt-cardboard.herokuapp.com/ . It's limited, and I haven't come back to it since, but I thought the end result was a powerful example of what you can get done quickly when you're using the right tools. (I have a video recording of the entire process which I'll upload to YouTube if anyone is interested in seeing it.)

Anyway, I wouldn't normally peddle my wares on HN, but the whole point of Bullet Train is to try to achieve new levels of developer productivity and happiness, which seemed relevant to the question you were asking. There's nothing quite like this in the Python world (I'm frequently told by Python developers,) but there probably should be, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before there is.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468929

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