Sometimes in a business, there are requirements to have certain things to be done, now these things can be either coded from scratch or can be used by any external provider and paid for a monthly subscription.

Certain times we don't want to go with these external providers it might be data-related issues or even the cost is too high for the subscription.

Developing such features from scratch can cause bugs and months of solving until you reach some stability, at these times it's good to use pre-existing open-source software where you can modify them and use them in your SaaS.

Let's have a look into some of the software that I've been using for multiple projects.

But before we start, I wanted to share my book "Building SaaS the Right Way" where I've covered all the necessary details on how to find a perfect SaaS idea, validate it, manage cost, find the right team, check the tech stack, marketing, and many more things.

Monitor your CRON Jobs and Tasks in realtime (Healthchecks)

I have projects where multiple CRON schedulers are working in the background, these are responsible for sending emails, notifying people of updates, or even making necessary operations to the database.

It's better to have a monitoring system place like Healthchecks for checking regular updates on the CRON Jobs. It also supports integrations with multiple platforms like Telegram, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and many more.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks

Manage your email servers hustle-free (MailCow)

If you are developing a platform for doing anything with cold emails you must have heard about EmailEngine, where you need to pay some licence to use it.

MailCow on the other hand is a dockerized email server for managing your domains, email accounts, emails, and using the APIs.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

Don't write backend APIs again and again (AppWrite)

Writing the same set of backend APIs for Database, Auth, Storage, Messaging, and other common features sometimes feels like a waste of time.

Using AppWrite you can cover most of them, and it will save you time from re-doing everything.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite

Build your Q&A center for your SaaS business (Answer)

So one way is to pay to platforms like Intercom to build your Q&A center where people can interact and post their questions or, you can use Answer from Apache to do this.

It's an open-source Q&A platform for your SaaS startup.

Build your LLM Apps using the power of Low Code and Opensource (FlowiseAI)

If you are an AI-based SaaS you will love this,

Building LLM models cannot be so easy with this, it's a Low Code editor where you can simply drag and drop your AI models and connect them, add some training data to it, and then see the results of how it works.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/FlowiseAI/Flowise

Another Low Code and Opensource software for Even-Driven Apps (Node-Red)

If you have a SaaS or mobile app that runs on even-driven architecture, you know sometimes this can become complicated.

Here use Node-Red a Low Code platform where you can create events simply by drag and drop and then use it in your SaaS.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/node-red

See guys, I'm not asking you to create your SaaS completely with open-source software, but sometimes this software helps us to quickly implement our logic and test the application as MVP so later on we can focus more on developing our in-house solutions.

If you have the same approach as mine you will be able to validate your SaaS much quicker.

I also wrote a book especially for AI-based SaaS, if you want to learn how you can start with AI, tech stack, hosting, GPUs, AI-Models, or how much it may cost you, and other deep insights. "Cheat Code for Building AI-Driven SaaS 2.O" book of mine you must check.