[freedomben]

This is a great idea, and it looks like you've done a great job! I share your enthusiasm for these printers. I have a Rongta receipt printer sitting on my desk that I like to play with :-)

I have a business usecase for something like this (now that Chrome doesn't allow printing to ESC/POS), and exposing the printer interface as an HTTP API is a clever and great solution! But, sending the data through a third party is a complete no-go for us for reasons of compliance. For this architecture to work for us we would have to host it on our VPN and serve it from our own domain as our customers have a strict whitelist.

As cool an idea as this is, honestly though I don't think this should be a SaaS. Certainly it doesn't fit the typical mold of SaaS where there's nothing to install because it's all delivered through the web. Given you have to install a local Pi or other, you lose all the benefits of SaaS and also incur all the downsides of SaaS. It feels like it was shoehorned into a SaaS because otherwise it would be very hard to monetize. I don't blame you for that because it is indeed a hard problem to figure out how to get paid (in fact I've abandoned good ideas prevously because it was either SaaSify something that shouldn't be a SaaS or else face huge obstacles getting paid), but I wanted to share my thoughts honestly.

[lionpixel]

Thank you for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate you sharing your perspective, especially about the compliance requirements. You're right, and you're not alone - many others in the thread have expressed similar concerns about the SaaS approach. After taking some time to reflect, I've decided to pivot towards a dual-track solution:

1. A free, self-hostable version for businesses with compliance requirements or those who prefer to maintain their own infrastructure 2. A cloud version for users who want a managed solution

I'll be working on both versions over the next few weeks. :)

[freedomben]

That's great news! Seriously, kudos to you for taking such feedback so constructively. I do really think this could be a great path for you. Particularly once the core product is giong, you could look into add SSO, RBAC, and other enterprise-y management features and have a legit open product that makes money selling managed/hosted services to corps. This is niche enough yet common enough that I could see it being very attractive to people building higher level products!

Let me know if I can be of help. I've got quite a bit of devops/infra experience especially containers and kubernetes, as well as mostly backend dev (though enough frontend to be considered "full stack" by many, but IMHO I'm not great at frontend). Very happy to help consult!

[mike_d]

Since this is basically just a thin wrapper around node-thermal-printer, how much of your SaaS revenue is going back to the author of that project?