dude I've been having an absolute blast working on my own SAS the past couple of months and in this video I want to reveal to you all the tech that I used to get it done let's go through all the most interesting tools together I'm going to tell you what I pay for them if I think they're worth it and show you around all the analytics the whole behind the scenes in this video I want to give you a realistic idea of what it means to build your own SAS and the tech that you need for it let's see it all right man the gazillion dollar unicorn stack here's exactly what I'm using for everything that's involved in this application and just so you have a very basic idea right of what this app even does trust me this is not a I'm not trying to sell you anything I just want to show you what it does so the core idea is you can get more reviews from your users or your customers and showcase those um positive reviews on your website right to increase trust to whatever product that you're making whatever SAS you're developing whatever um so you can basically collect reviews text or video reviews even we make it very easy to collect those reviews and we optimize those for very fast delivery so from the infrastructure of things from the tech we use for optimization that's going to be really interesting so these are automatically optimized for high performance delivery on your own website meaning the images and videos that people leave you in their reviews right so let's see how it works under the hood what I use in the gazillion dollar unicorn stack also known as the Josh stack no not really and it all starts with a framework which is nexj S14 now I think it makes sense to do it like this we go through each kind of thing I've listed here on the left like deployment web hooks payments and so on a step by step so that way for each one I can also tell you my thoughts on is this tool even good man and with next S14 I believe so and the reason being they have a fancy website which is all I need for my tech choices the react framework for the web used by some of the world's largest companies next enables you to create high quality web applications with the power of react components all right dude I'm sold I'm going to use it no but jokes aside next year S14 I'm having a really really good time developing it and I think it's very very good part of the stack for deployment I'm using the triangle company now that's versel by the way if you don't know what that is and let me show you through the dashboard now I've deployed to AWS amplify my nexts apps a lot of times in the past it's great but my reasoning for versel was convenience I wanted to get this launched as soon as possible and versell makes that pretty easy so they also provide stuff like analytics out of the box which is awesome right so right here we can see how many people let me zoom in so you can see this easier um come to the website each day so the last week that was was about like 3.2k people um today that's like about 122 people and you can see where they come from like from YouTube from Twitter um from slack who came from slack where those people come from like the most part from India from the United States Germany United Kingdom and so on and basically it's just convenience right it's not super cheap I'm paying $20 per month for versel but for the convenience of launching this product really fast it was worth it I think now for the image in video processing for the automatic optimization a very very big part of this app it's AWS so basically how it works is people that want to give you a review on our platform can either upload images or video for example of themselves talking about their experience with your product right which is great for you and then we take that video stored inside of an S3 bucket which is like a cloud storage you could also use like Cloud flare for this but S3 works pretty well and once that file is uploaded to S3 automatically trigger an optimization routine that either compresses your image or optimizes your video for adaptive streaming and so on um I'm going to get into that separately but essentially the media is optimized right and that happens inside of an AWS Lambda which is a serverless function that you pay for based on two things first of how long the function runs and then secondly how much memory each Lambda has so for example video processing is super super resource intensive you need a lot of power for it so the Lambda that handles the video processing needs about 10 GB or at least I'm allocating it 10 gbes of memory which is quite a lot but it's also of course more expensive but that way we can make sure that the videos that you get as your reviews are really really fast and pretty similar thing for the images uh we also use cloud flare for a part of that but in this whole process FFM pack one of the probably most underrated tools ever we use very heavily the bottom line of what FFM pack does it basically lets you convert media images to other formats videos to other formats and so on you can take an mp4 convert it to an Avi video right as the kind of most basic use case but you can also optimize videos to be served on a website which is what we do and once that image or video is processed it's put into either the cloud flare CDN for images or it's put into the Amazon CDN for videos called Cloud front so either way your images or videos are served from The Edge they're served really really fast that's what the optimization is about on AWS honestly AWS is not the most intuitive it's the first time I've used it for such a heavy use case but it works pretty well once you get the hang of it and but it does take a while at least it took me a while to understand what the hell is going on with Lambda now next up web hooks very very important part of any infrastructure of basically any app you need to make sure that any web hook that you have in your app really arrives at its destination cuz web hooks contain things like payments right if somebody purchases the Premium plan on your app that payment is triggered by your payment provider we're going to get to that later as well and with a web hook you are now expected to handle like database updates for that user's paid plan yourself right and it's very very important that this web hook actually arrives on your endpoint so you can update the user that just paid you right otherwise they couldn't access their paid plan or whatever so bottom line it's really really important to make sure that web hooks arrive that media is processed when it needs to be that payments are processed properly and for that we use qash that is made by up stash and that's basically allows you to have a delivery guarantee for your API request it automatically retries on failure has a bunch of other stuff um by the way I work at up stash I even made this little info graphic here and but I would have used the tool if I didn't work it up stash either way I think it's great and it's very very important to make sure that your web hooks actually arrive when they need to now this app also supports a Premium plan that we have right here under the priceing page there's the hobby so the free tier you can use it completely for free if you want and the Premium plan which is right now $12 per month which is probably way too cheap considering all of our like competitors are more than double that expensive but um I just wanted to implement payments and see how that works and for that we use uh uh lemon squeezy right here it's very similar to stripe they have even been acquired by stripe but the nice thing about lemon squeezy is that they care about the tax right I live in Germany taxes are a pretty heavy topic here and for a company to take care of taxes even though they are charging more than stripe would be uh for me it's worth it cuz they're The Merchant of Records so they handle the tax compliance and I think that's just a pretty nice convenience so I need to do less when it comes to fighting taxes each year for the user authentication we use clerk now there's so many Alternatives man there's kind there's next off by implementing off yourself I ended up going with clerk because just like the triangle company for deployment it's defin definitely not the cheapest option um but they do provide nice analytics and they also let you launch your product really really fast and I've opened up the dashboard right here you can see the total users all time of this project are 619 with wait what that doesn't even why are there more users active in August than there are total users any okay that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but anyways it's like around the 600 people Mark so it's not like this giant app you know and you can see like a graph here this is when I first announced the software on YouTube it got like 256 users in one day and since then it's been going down a bit so right now it's like pretty consistently about 40 or 35 new users per day which I think is like really really cool actually for something you build for people to actually use it man that's that's very nice and lastly for testing right stuff needs to work when somebody submits a review it needs to be optimized when somebody purchases a payment plan they need to get what they pay for right and that's that's pretty similar to web hooks in you need reliability in your app it needs to work that's why testing is really important and for that we use uh both just for unit test so testing individual functions and Cypress for endtoend test so for example one thing we're testing is when you submit a review so we automatically instruct a headless browser to go to this path and actually submit a review that it actually shows up in your dashboard right so that way we can make sure end to end yes people can actually submit reviews same thing for the authentication flow we also test that um the freelancer I work with on this project actually wrote that I was really really impressed how well the test is and that way we can make sure that you know stuff that you expect to work actually works and that's probably why this is also a certified Hood Classic No but Jokes Aside man I'm having a really really good time with this stack now in that video I forgot the database I use postgress hosted on neon dote but just because they had a free tier to be honest if I would start over I would probably go with a cloud flare D1 SQL database and also many people have been asking me about the UI uh and most of this I did it myself I'm building some things on top of shaty and UI and customizing his components but most of the stuff comes from a figma template that I got and just kind of reimplemented the components myself and codes so really there's not a lot of magic involved here dude I hope this video helps you figure out which tag you want to use for your next project and then I'm going to see you in the next video that's going to be it until then have a good one and bye-bye