How we improved our Lighthouse score from 70 to 96.
We recently optimized the hell out of our Lighthouse score, and one of our landing pages went from a low 70s score to a cool 96 and above score.…
How I integrated Intercom into my SaaS's Vue.js app
In a recent post on customer feedback I mentioned being a recent convert to chat widget-driven tools. I thought they sucked, but I was wrong. Since then, I actually switched from Drift to Intercom because Intercom's focus — support & communication — matched my business better than Drift's heavy sales focus. To…
How I set up SSL with Let's Encrypt for my SaaS customers' dashboards
Update 14-08-2019: Greenlock is awesome but needs support. If you don't want to code this yourself consider donating $100 or so on their indiegogo page so they can ship Greenlock v3 and stay compatible with the Let's Encrypt API. Recently I pushed a long overdue feature for Checkly: SSL for…
How we added a public API to our existing SaaS app
Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation. More specifically, we'll dive into: Refactoring the existing Hapi.js based APIAPI key based authenticationRefactoring models with Objection.jsValidating…
Managing EU VAT with Stripe for a SaaS is not *that* hard
This is a short follow up to last week's story on Stripe Billing as a reader on Hackernews commented that it seemed we didn't handle VAT. We do, but I just left it out of the story. Update 25-04-2019: Stripe just released a big update to their Billing product that…
Our Stripe Billing implementation and the one webhook to rule them all
When I started Checkly, all the typical SaaS things around billing, credit cards and prorating confused the hell out of me. I understood them from an intellectual point of view, but not really from an implementation point of view. Sure, I hooked up some payment providers (Adyen, Paypal) at previous…
How we deal with plan limits in the front end of our SaaS app
If you run a SaaS, you probably want to show a user that he/she is almost running out of widgets. Or that he/she can get some cool feature on a more expensive plan. In this post we look at how implemented this in our Vue.js frontend application.…
How we manage plans & features in our SaaS app
How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit of her plan? What if she's a trial user? Turns out this is a mix of things Feature…
Node.js API and Web Frameworks for 2019
2018 was an interesting year for Node.js frameworks and open source software in general. Developer communities discussed the role of corporate sponsorship and how to maintain a project used by millions but not supported financially. Similarly, security concerns were top of mind with some popular Node / JS packages being…
How we got a 100% Lighthouse performance score for our Vue.js app
Since launch, we didn’t pay too much attention to the front end performance of the main Checkly web app. Shame on us. What better reason to dive into this than the publishing of the excellent The Cost of Javascript in 2018 by Google’s Addy Osmani? TL;DR: it…