I think this makes sense. Ideas:<p>- Showcase your reciprocal contributions you make back to django community packages (e.g. Jazzband packages).<p>- Release a permissively licensed django package (with no catches) under your GH's org and brand name and have it take off. (e.g. django-forge-admin)<p>- The holy grail would be contributions to django itself. Example: Adding more CSS variables in django admin to font-size and font-family. Add rem, %, calc, flex, etc.<p>- Early startups funding: $5,000 for MVPs up into 6 figures. Your price point could be a bit higher. Email early founders and see what their reaction is. Use that feedback to tailor a business-friendly license to address the concerns of people with decision making powers. Commenters opinions matter, but they're not necessarily your clientele.<p>- Strike custom deals to make the sale.<p>- Add on custom development hours and add a clause to incorporate the work back into your product for reuse.<p>- Expect to be reaching out to founders often, using cold email introductions, both for advice, but also to show you're flexible. Be willing to hop on a zoom, demo it, etc.<p>- Find early startups to use your framework for testimonials and social proofing.<p>- I've personally set these up before many times in django at previous places. It takes weeks of effort to bootstrap, especially if you factor in billing. No it's not 8 hours. It's weeks of effort.<p>My only doubt is, I think you may ultimately make more money striking big deals to do development work. What's more efficient, a $100-$150k deal with one customer or being on the hook for 100 customers?
The descriptions seem a little bit scarce for me. Like others I also wonder who's the intended audience. For 1k/year/repository I need to be quite serious with a project, but that project needs to be basically non existent (otherwise I would probably have the basis already) while also being somewhat serious.<p>Formulating it a bit provocative: In what way is it more than an expensive cookiecutter repository? (Especially with a one-time-use policy per subscription)
Interesting idea. I've been using Django for 10+ years and like all the choices you've made here. Not 100% what I personally prefer but close. And the decisions I differ on I'm curious about: "Hmm, should I be doing it that way?"<p>In the past few months I've been working on side projects and have gone through the process of setting up a similar template (just for my own use), which I've used with two different side projects.<p>I think my interest in buying this is not so much to replace my own template but to borrow parts of it.<p>From the borrow perspective, I wonder if this could be worth it to some established, non-agency companies that use Django.<p>Really nice code you can copypasta over? Doesn't take too much of that to get to $1000 of value.
This project looks very useful. It's easy to burn through $1000 in software engineering time setting up the initial stages of a project and this looks like it does a great job of streamlining that for you.<p>Another thing I like about this project: I've always felt that the rails community does a better job than the django community in the out-of-the-box experience of setting up a new app. This project seems to bring some of that niceness to the django world (and would be similar to <a href="https://jumpstartrails.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jumpstartrails.com/</a>).
Great idea to bootstrap a product like this using an opinionated approach that I mostly agree with. The biggest challenge here will be that the audience you're most likely to target with this will likely be more interested in doing this themselves off a repo they've already got written up and charging $10k for it to a private client instead.
This is like SaaS Pegasus <a href="https://www.saaspegasus.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saaspegasus.com/</a> which is a fraction of the cost and has a lot of the same functions. I wish I could demo it, but I do understand why I can't. Regardless, I hope this project takes off.
This is an interesting project. I'm not sure I'd pay $1000/year in the current configuration as I don't have any projects that could justify it, but I would certainly pay to get insight into how other devs are setting up their projects as well as their development environment and deployment pipeline (maybe in a community format?). For example I have a shortlist of things "I need to read-up on" when it comes to my Python/Django projects. Things like Poetry, Pre-commit, Black, TOML files etc. as well as deployment choices (Render, Fly, DO Apps). These are things that I know will be useful but I just haven't had time to configured and look into. Things like django-coookiecutter are great, but they only really cover the project structure.
There is absolutely a market for this kind of product. If it saves someone a few days of work, the ROI is clear.<p>However, in my experience (have a similar product geared towards API backends: <a href="https://apibakery.com" rel="nofollow">https://apibakery.com</a>), many developers will stop at "boilerplate", think "cookiecutter", and balk away.<p>The most vocal complaints for me were:<p>- it's just boilerplate, therefore how dare you charge<p>- I can do that in an hour (all devs are optimists :)<p>- why should I pay a recurring fee for a one-off use (valid, and made me rethink my pricing strategy)<p>Ultimately, I suspect your users will mainly be founders who just want to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible. If you haven't already, engage with communities such as IndieHackers and r/SaaS.<p>Good luck!
I think I might be your target audience (oggling with the idea to create as SaaS, and good background in python). And let me be blunt: your promo material sucks<p>The docs show me what words to type to get your product, but not what your product gives me. From what I figured out it gives me a lot of django stuff. So should I go away now to learn all that djange stuff (probably yes), but then why do I need django forge?<p>The best explanation is the heading of the video. But still, what is the benefit. How difficult is it to build a SaaS with vanilla django, and how much easier is it with django-forge. I couldnt figure that out.<p>Can you make a video, where you show how to make a full fledged SaaS with django-forge and deploy it? How long would that video be?
$1000/yr is steep for starting a project from scratch with it. You need to really be sure about needing it and about it paying for itself.<p>The Rails equivalent (<a href="https://jumpstartrails.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jumpstartrails.com/</a>) is $249/year and the Laravel equivalent (<a href="https://spark.laravel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://spark.laravel.com/</a>) is $99/project.<p>Those seem geared in features and price at hobbyist wanting to monetize a side project. This looks like it would be just as helpful for hobbyists using Django, but it’s not priced right for them.<p>Maybe it’s more for people who are about to start a second revenue project.
* Forge the Laravel server management SaaS<p>* Forge the Django SaaS framework<p>I'm sure other things use the name "Forge" but just seems odd you'd purposefully use the same one. Could also make your SEO rather difficult.
I assume the typical dev sentiment is that I would rather spend/waste/invest 2 hours of my time rather than spend/waste/invest 1 hour trying to read other peoples code and documentation. Devs are fidgity bunch. And as the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray said, "The only solutions that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves."<p>Based on the quote above boilerplates are for people who are more founder-y than dev-y. Some see codebase as solution, some see code as solution.
I'm interested and have purchased SaaSPegasus.com before. I like to compare the base setups between Django SaaS deployments for learnings. But SaaSPegasus is $299, imo $1,000 is far too much, and I wouldn't purchase it.
Add a Wagtail CMS layer and you'll have a number of agencies / companies potentially ready to use this as a service.<p>Do you plan on providing a hosted version as well, or just the core shipped package?
How is this different from Pegasus <a href="https://www.saaspegasus.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saaspegasus.com/</a> which is a fully basked SaaS?
Disclaimer / shameless plug: I have an OSS project in this space, <a href="https://www.reactivated.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.reactivated.io</a>, and plan to do a Show HN on it tomorrow.<p>With that out of the way, I think having more opinionated Django frameworks is a great thing. Particularly around styling and forms.<p>I also think it's interesting to try to "productize" (I think there's a better word) what is often done as consulting. That is, bottling up and selling experience. So while the price may seem high, there's a ton of wisdom behind it. An experienced Django consultant is easily thousands of dollars per week.<p>I wish you the best!
From the pricing page [0]:<p>Is there a free trial?<p>Unfortunately, because of the logistics of how this works, there is no free trial period. We do our best to give you an idea of what you're buying via public documentation, videos, and an overview of the repo. If you buy it and truly decide you aren't going to use it, contact us about a refund.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.djangoforge.dev/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.djangoforge.dev/pricing/</a>