How to launch a paid SaaS in an afternoon

Most of the work in launching a paid product isn't the product. It's the wiring: a host for your code, a way to sign in users, a payment integration, and somewhere to look when something breaks. Each one is a separate vendor with its own SDK and its own dashboard.

This walkthrough does all of it on one platform. The product is yours; the rest is built in.

Step 1: Deploy your app

Connect your GitHub repo and push. Forte builds and deploys any container — no Dockerfile or pipeline config required. If you push again, it redeploys.

That gives you a running app with a URL, autoscaling, and TLS. Nothing to configure.

Step 2: Sign in your users

Turn on authentication for your end users. You get email, SMS, and Google sign-in, with verification, sessions, and password policies. Verification emails and texts go out from your own branded sender.

You don't add Auth0 or Clerk, and you don't store passwords yourself.

Step 3: Charge your users

Payments are powered by Stripe, but you manage them inside Forte. There is no separate Stripe account to create, no Connect onboarding, and no webhook endpoint to host or secure. All you need to do is create payments for Forte users and manage saved payment methods.

Tax and refunds are handled the same way. Payment events are delivered to your services, so you can run your own logic when a charge succeeds.

Step 4: Know what happened when something breaks

Once real users show up, something will return a 500. Forte records every request and links it to the log lines your app wrote while handling it. Click a request, read its logs.

No log groups, no queries, no separate tracing tool.

That's the afternoon

You deployed an app, signed in your users, charged them, and you can debug them — without assembling five services. The parts that aren't your product are already connected.

Ready to try it? Start building free →