Dotnet for Solopreneurs

Azure App Services

In the 2.5+ years that I've been a solo startup founder (nights and weekends), I have found that one technology pair absolutely excels above all others in my SaaS and open source journey:

• A Linux-based Azure App Service (Windows pricing is stupid).
• A dotnet web api.

With these two resources, you can pretty much do anything that you want. I used to find serverless functions interesting, but nothing compares to getting the raw power and customization of a traditional, fully-fledged server side app like a dotnet web api.

I also like that Azure App Services have flat pricing which is nice and safe for a solo dev like me - I don't want to wake up to some stupid $104K serverless horror story bill because some spammer decided to hammer my Azure functions endpoint a million times while I was sleeping. No thanks. Usually what I do is go into my Azure tenant, provision an App Service Plan, and then add each app to the App Service Plan. Easy peasy, and my uptimes are very good.

Azure app services are basically little abstracted VPS instances minus the DevOps junk of actually having to manage a VPS. I don't mind paying a little more for the convenience, and I basically get the same experience as I would with a VPS.

SPA + Dotnet Web API + Database

Honestly, the tech isn't "sexy", but a:

• Single page app (VueJS, React, whatever).
• A dotnet web api.
• An intelligently-designed relational database.

Pretty much solves most problems I've ever encountered. To me, this tech is "sexy" because it's battle-tested and darn reliable. And the whole "but what about web scale" argument rarely applies in startups, at least not in my journey. Well-designed apis, databases, and single page apps are absolute workhorses, and I've never needed more than a few workhorses.

Job Orchestrators / Background Jobs

And finally, for "out of process" tasks like background jobs, scheduled jobs, CRON jobs, job orchestration, etc. a solid background job library or job orchestrator does the job beautifully.

Full disclosure, I'm building and aiming to have my dotnet job orchestrator Didact releasing as an initial version around early February 2025. Didact is perfectly designed for use cases like this, I plan to use it to both run my micro saas I currently manage as well as automate my business for Didact itself - "dog fooding" my own product so to speak.

But even if you don't use Didact, solutions like Hangfire or Quartz .NET also do background jobs.

I don't quite identify with the typical "indie hacker" crowd anymore, but the most well-known indie hacker of all time, Pieter Levels, runs all of his businesses in a totally automated fashion. People give him a lot of crap because his apps are messy PHP files, but one thing that people constantly overlook is his intelligent use of CRON jobs/background jobs. He has been able to almost completely automate his apps through background jobs, and for some reason people just gloss over this detail all of the time.

I guess since I'm building Didact and since I love data engineering and async processing, I'm super positively biased towards this type of tech, but it's really incredible what you can do with a set of background jobs. That is how you actually automate a business forreal, can speak from experience.

Conclusion

Anyways, consider taking the jump sometime if you never have! It's the single most arduous, unbelievably difficult journey I've ever taken in my life, and life is much, much different for a bootstrapped solo founder vs. a VC-backed startup, but what a journey it is!