Building a SaaS Application with Next.js, Prisma, Auth0 and Stripe
This article is about my experience building a SaaS application. And while this won't be a step-by-step guide on how to build a SaaS app, I will be providing you valuable insight on what the process was like for me as well as teaching you about the methods and technologies that I used.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a business model whereby the user pays a subscription to access cloud-based services or an application. In my case, I wanted to build an educational course platform where users can purchase an individual course to own for life or pay a subscription to gain access to all premium courses.
Before building this application, I had only used Stripe Checkout to process one-off payments. I wanted to use this opportunity to go a little deeper - primarily learning how Stripe handles recurring payments. I plan to implement what I have learned throughout this process into my site, which will house my premium courses one day.
The final version of this SaaS project ended up with a few third-party services, each handling their own piece of the puzzle and using webhooks to keep them in sync. Below is an architecture diagram representing the relationships between those services.
