SaaA in practice: the tools I'm building for myself
Last week I wrote about Software as an Agent. Here's what I'm actually building.
These aren't products. They're personal infrastructure I built for myself in minutes, that used to require a SaaS subscription.
SaaA for... Analytics
Google Analytics is bloated and dead. PostHog is great when data gets huge, when analytics get complicated, when there's a team running it. None of that's me right now. Early-stage startup metrics are pretty basic: are we growing, by how much, what are people doing? That's it.
I asked my agent to build me simple event tracking, using our DB, and it's done in a few minutes and tracking.
All I need to do is ask "are we growing this week vs last?" It runs the query and tells me. "Plot daily signups by source." It plots them. "Who's hitting the pricing page repeatedly without converting?" It returns the list. Schedule a routine to send you these if you want.
The bonus unlock is that the events live in the same database as my customer data. My agent can join across them in a single query. "Which users who hit the pricing page this week have spent $1k+ historically?" One question, one query, one answer. That's a lot of messing around with charts and filters to get those from a website I have to leave my workflow to go look at.
Sure, what I built is rough. Won't go multi-user. Likely won't scale. But it works for what I need. Cost me 15min.
That's SaaA. The minimum software surface an agent can wield. The agent does the wielding.
SaaA for... Sending pitch decks
A great investor asked for a deck on my latest project. I wasn't going to pay Docsend monthly just to send a trackable file. So I built DeckIn in 30 minutes.
Email-gated, self-hosted, slide-by-slide attention tracking. There's no dashboard. You install it by telling your agent. You query the stats by asking your agent. You set up a daily email summary by asking your agent to schedule a task. The product is a database, an API, and a viewer page. The interface is whatever agent you're already using.
I shipped this one publicly: deckin.bubs.co. Self-host in about 10 minutes.
Recipes, not packages
What you'll find at github.com/dmonsef/deckin isn't a binary or a Docker image or a package you npm install. It's a markdown doc your agent reads and runs. That's how SaaA distributes naturally. The recipe is the artifact.
It's a different shape than traditional OSS. You don't compile it. You don't deploy it. Your agent reads the doc, asks you for the credentials it needs, and assembles the working tool inside your stack. The "install" is a conversation.
I can't be the only one building this way. If you've shipped your own SaaA, share the recipe. More of these in the world is the goal.
What's next
There's a small suite of SaaA primitives every founder needs. The email-gated deck. Analytics for your database. An issue tracker tied to your Postgres. A customer feedback inbox. A snippet store. None of them need to be products you log into. All of them can be tables your agent already has access to.
I'll keep shipping these as I build them. Some will be public recipes like DeckIn. Some will just stay in my own stack.
If you've never built one, start with whatever you're paying a SaaS for that you wish was just sitting next to your other data. Describe it to your agent. The agent does the rest.