What is AppCafe Platform?

SaaS is one of fastest growing software businesses. Everyday more and more software companies are moving towards SaaS with recurring revenue models because recurring has more growth and more predictability.

Creating a SaaS application is non trivial. It requires you to build a lot of services around it (see below). These do not provide business value in themselves, so why should every company have to re-invent the wheel?

This is the problem we are solving. AppCafe is a PaaS (Platform As A Service) for SaaS applications. Now you can focus on creating your unique application, adding valuable features and competing in the market while we we provide the boilerplate plumbing around it to run it as a SaaS business.

Why use AppCafe platform?

Any SaaS subscription business requires many of the features described in next section. While these features are necessary, they are unlikely your unique value proposition or competitive advantage. With AppCafe, we provide these services so that you can focus on your app. So you can use AppCafe to avoid building, maintaining and enhancing these yourself. You can save valuable time and resources that you can invest into your core building.

Apps and Plans Management

If you want to sell one or more apps, first step is to create pricing plans, upgrade / downgrade capability, infrastructure sizing, optional features and so on

User Management

Next a user will register, do reCAPTCHA verification to avoid bots, verify email, recover password. Later they may modify or delete account.

Subscription Management

After registration, the user will select an app, select a plan, subscribe, enter credit card and purchase. Later they may need ability to pause subscription.

App Provisioning (Install and uninstall)

This is one of more difficult problems. After a purchase, we may need input from user, then create new install for that user, provide login credentials to the user. We will need to uninstall apps upon deletion.

Domains and Traffic Routing

By default industry standard is to use a subdomain for each tenant, however in some cases, e.g. website hosting apps such as wordpress, some users want to use their own domain. Traffic routing rules need to be created so that specific subdomain or domain routes traffic to appropriate instance of app.

Monthly Invoicing and billing

Now that the user is using your app, you need to send monthly invoices, send reminders before charging credit cards, store credit cards securely, charge every month, handle failed payments / chargebacks, stop charging on unsubscribe or account deletion.

App Monitoring, Reliability and Uptime

Software issues happen all the time (yes even Google and Facebook crashes). A more reliable way is to have an automated way to monitor apps, make sure they are working properly and restart when needed.

Automated Backups and Data Recovery

Data loss prevention is a big consideration for any business. You want to protect your users against errors, bugs, hacking, disk failure and so on. AppCafe enables automated backups and data recovery.

Multi-Tenant Infrastructure and Security

You want to keep every user’s data isolated from other users, make sure any malicious user is not able to access other user’s data. Doing this without duplicating infra and keeping costs lower requires a bit of an engineering.

Analytics Insights and Dashboards

Once you have a thriving business, you will want to know insights such as which features are more popular, which ones are not, where are users coming from, why are users leaving, projected growth rate and recurring revenue projections, customer acquisition cost. Understanding these will help you avoid costly mistakes and grow your user base and revenue.

Accounting and Tax Compliance

Do not forget uncle Sam. As you build your customer base, you need need to manage accounting, tax compliance, profit / loss. AppCafe integrates with several accounting software so you can manage these with an application of your choice.

AppCafe commitment - No Vendor Lock-in and continuous platform improvement

Unlike most software out there, AppCafe is built using open technologies so you are not locked into our platform. We continue to invest in our platform and make it better, improve infrastructure, fix bugs, add features so we continue to improve and create value for you over time.