SaaSassin

Inspiration

We were inspired by how much money early-stage startups and CS clubs on campus waste on SaaS subscriptions, often without realizing that powerful free alternatives exist.

What it does

SaaSassin provides instant access to powerful open-source alternatives to expensive SaaS products, all hosted and managed on a single platform, instead of requiring each team to configure and maintain dozens of separate services.

How we built it

We built our platform by hosting open-source alternatives like Mattermost, AppFlowy, Jitsi Meet, NextCloud, NocoDB, Cal.com, Wekan, Docuseal, Gitea, Taiga, and Penpot on a virtual machine, using Docker for containerization.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges were ensuring that ports did not clash between services, making sure we downloaded and installed the correct software versions, and properly setting up the environment so all services could run smoothly together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we successfully deployed and integrated a wide range of services onto a single machine, solving real world problems that startups and student organizations often face, reducing the total cost of software, and made it easy to access advanced tools without technical barriers. Our platform shows that open-source technology can compete with traditional SaaS solutions, that cost much more.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned about self-hosting, server management, containerization, and how financial literacy applies to technology decisions.

What's next for SaaSassin

Moving forward, we want to make SaaSassin even easier to use by building a main dashboard where users can access all services from one place, without needing to remember different URLs or ports. We also plan to automate deployment, so that organizations can spin up their own SaaSassin instance in just a few clicks, without needing a very deep technical understanding.