Burnt out while developing my SaaS and sought help on Fiverr.

As mentioned in the title, I am building my SaaS platform that includes a light browser extension and a web application to manage the user data and subscription details. I built the extension in 4 days and polished it ready to go within 7 days. I then moved to building the web application side to manage the user profiles and subscription with the hopes that I will add additional features on the web application.

I have previously used flask for backed and plain JavaScript, CSS and HTML to develop web applications. However, I wanted to learn new tech stack since my job requires this new tech stack(Express.js for backend, React.js for frontend(I liked the Single Page Application capability that react provides-it’s smooth) , and SQLite3). I built this in 5 days, sleeping around 6am the last 3 days.

I used SQLite3 for development and everything worked perfectly and I was able to test it out comprehensively. Then came deploying the app and I tried railway.app but found it a bit complicated and so I switched to heroku. Heroku however, does not support SQLite and I had to buy the PostgreSQL add-on that they provide. Here are where my frustrations started. I had used sessions to manage when users are logged in and logged out and when accessing routes that required authentication.

After deploying on heroku, I could log in successfully but not access the routes that required login and I would be redirected to the login page. At this point I was so tired that I thought of ditching the whole web application thing because my service was in the browser extension. However, I decided against it and instead opted to have a fresh pair of eyes debug it for me on Fiverr. I removed the sensitive files like .env and also the feature lists, zipped it and got someone to debug it for me.

It’s strange indie hacking when you’re the only one who knows your project and there are no office hours you can go to like in college or senior engineers you can go to like when working for a company. Also is there an AI that can debug folders and not individual files ??

Anyway, I’m waiting to see if the person solves it and saves me the headache.