Build & Rank Your Own SaaS with AI

I learned how to build software the expensive way.

I hired devs. I spent a lot of money. I made mistakes that cost me thousands and taught me almost nothing at the time. Slowly, through people teaching me, through paying others, and through a lot of practical trial and error, I figured out what actually matters and what is a waste of money.

Here is the good news. You can skip almost all of that now. With AI, you can build and ship real software yourself for next to nothing. Not a toy. A real app, with logins and payments, that people can pay you for.

This is the exact stack and the exact order I use to build everything solo: onlyTraction, ParasiteSEO, SEO Talos, Answer Socrates, and the SEO writer that powers my own content. No fluff, just the things I actually reach for. Steal all of it.

What you get out of this

I have paid developers thousands for things you can now do yourself for free. That is the whole point of this playbook.

By the end of this you will be able to build a real app with logins and payments, host it for next to nothing, add a blog that brings in free traffic, and ship the whole thing yourself. No dev team, and no permission needed.

What's inside

• The basics: how building software actually works now.
• Pick one AI and stick with it.
• Setting up Claude Code.
• Planning before you build, the real secret.
• Talking instead of typing.
• The build stack: logins, payments, database, hosting.
• What it actually costs.
• Adding a blog for free traffic.
• Your build checklist, and every tool in one place.

First, the basics

If you have never built software, here is the whole thing in plain English. You do not need to memorize any of it. You just need to know the words so the rest makes sense.

You do not write code from scratch anymore. You describe what you want, and the AI writes it. You are the director. The AI is the builder. You plan and steer, it types.

A few terms you will see:

• Front end: what people see and click. The pages, the buttons, the design.
• Back end: the engine behind it. The logic and the rules that make everything work.
• Database: where your app remembers things, like users and their data.
• Auth: logins, and how people sign in.
• Payments: how you take money.
• Hosting: putting your app online so people can actually use it.
• Domain: your web address, like oliver.com.
• Design: how it looks and feels. The AI handles a lot of this, and you guide it.

That is genuinely most of it. Everything below is just picking the best tool for each piece and letting AI do the heavy lifting.

1. Pick one AI and stick with it

There is always a shiny new object, especially with AI. New models every week. New types of AI for images, video, voice, you name it. You could spend your whole life switching tools and never build anything.

Don't. Pick one that is consistently near the top and does a lot of things well, then go deep on it.

For the record, Google is quietly becoming one of those. The versatility, and the money behind them, is genuinely surprising. I think they come out on top in a lot of the AI wars over time.

But for actually building software, my recommendation is simple: Claude Code.

2. Set up Claude Code

Claude Code is the whole environment. You can run it in the terminal as a CLI, or plug it straight into VS Code.

I have tried Cursor, Windsurf, and a few others. I even got Cursor free for a year as a gift. I still use plain VS Code for everything. You do not need the extra tools, because the AI lives in the CLI. You chat to it, it creates the files, and you build and learn as you go. It simplifies the whole thing, and you can do a huge amount with it.

If you are brand new, start with the Claude Code desktop app. It is less scary than the terminal and a bit simpler to learn. It has some genuinely nice features and a co-work mode that make things easier. Play around in there first.

Once you are comfortable, set up your own folder system. This is the intermediate move and it keeps everything clean:

• Make one folder for all your code. I literally called mine coding. New to this? Set up Claude Code in the terminal first.
• Inside it, make a new folder for each project.
• Claude Code sits on top of that head folder, so it is available in all of them.
• To start working: open a project folder, open the terminal, and type claude. That brings up the Claude interface.

That is it. Setup done.

3. Plan before you build

This is the real secret, and almost nobody talks about it.

The single most powerful thing you can do with any AI is plan properly before you write a line of code. Get the plan nailed down first. Anthropic, the people who built Claude Code, recommend the same thing, and these are very smart people. This principle holds no matter what tools you use.

Claude Code also lets you add skills: downloadable routines for specific jobs, and you can build your own. The SEO writer I sell is exactly that, a skill that runs the same research-to-article routine every time, so the output is good without me re-explaining the process.

The skill I lean on most for planning is GSD (Get Shit Done). It walks you through planning a whole app, interface, or marketing plan in a back and forth with the AI, so you end up with a clear plan before anything gets built.

It also handles context. Here is the tip nobody mentions: keep your context as low as you can. The AI pulls in everything from the chat so far, so if you start something brand new that has nothing to do with the old chat, clear it and start fresh. This does three things at once:

• Saves you tokens, which saves you money.
• Frees up the context window.
• Improves the quality of the output.

Low context is cheaper and better. Remember that one.

4. Talk, don't type

A tool I swear by: Wispr Flow. It is a little voice tool that lets you speak instead of type.

You talk, and the words come out. It is faster, and the output is better, because when you speak you naturally explain things in more detail than you would type. Pair Wispr Flow with GSD and it is a genuine powerhouse. I cannot recommend it enough.

5. The build stack

When you turn to building a real app, you need a few standard pieces. Here is what I use for each, and the mistakes to skip.

Logins: Clerk

Every app needs authentication, whether it is free or paid. There are a few options. I use Clerk.

Clerk is free for about 90% of people. I have paid developers a lot of money to build auth from scratch, and it was an absolute waste. It is a mess, it costs you money, and it breaks. Please do not build your own. Use Clerk.

One thing to get right: when you set up Google login (it runs through the Google API), put in the exact redirect URL that Clerk tells you to, and check it works. Also give people more than one option, like GitHub or a social account. It improves the experience and gives you a fallback for when Google has a wobble, which does happen.

Payments: Stripe

A few ways to take money: Lemon Squeezy, Polar.sh, and others. I just use Stripe. It is very easy to set up, and the AI knows it inside out, so it plugs in cleanly. It is my go-to every time.

Database: Neon

You will usually have a front end and a back end, and the back end needs a database. A lot of people use Supabase. I use it for a few things and pay monthly.

What I actually recommend is Neon (neon.tech). The free tier is bigger and it is easier to work with, so it is my default.

Hosting and storage: Cloudflare

Lately I run almost everything on Cloudflare, because it is incredibly cheap, often free, for nearly everything. The storage (R2) and database work really well, and you can use Cloudflare for most of the stack.

For the front end I usually build in React or Vite and deploy straight to Cloudflare with Workers. You can use Vercel too, but I like keeping it all in one place. I even buy my domains through Cloudflare, since it is usually cheaper.

The payoff: especially at the start, your app costs you basically nothing to run. Just the cost of a Claude Code membership. onlyTraction and this blog both run on Cloudflare, and your bang for your buck goes a lot higher when you live over here.

6. What it actually costs

For most people, $100 a month for Claude Code is plenty. I switch between the $100 and the $200 plans depending on how heavily I am building.

I cancelled almost every other subscription. I used to pay for ChatGPT for years and used it daily. Now it is all just Claude, and $100 to $200 a month is more than enough to do everything.

One honest warning: if you hit your limit, the answer is not to spin up a second account. That goes against the terms of service and you can get banned. Be careful.

7. Add a blog for free traffic

If you want organic SEO traffic, add a blog. The fast way to do it is Emdash.

Emdash is a new Cloudflare way to host your markdown files with an interface that is basically WordPress, except it all runs on Cloudflare. It is much faster than WordPress, and you skip the security issues, the bugs, and the constant updates. My own blog runs on it, and I highly recommend it.

Setup is simple: you grab the Emdash CLI code and paste it straight into Claude Code in the terminal, and it sets the whole thing up for you. You can even give Claude access to your Cloudflare account, so it can buy domains, set up the site, and handle everything in one go.

Your build checklist

Work through this in order, and tick each one off as you go.

• Install Claude Code and set it up in the terminal.
• Make your coding folder, and a new folder inside it for this project.
• Add GSD and plan the whole thing before writing any code.
• Set up logins with Clerk.
• Add payments with Stripe.
• Connect a database with Neon.
• Deploy the front end, storage, and domain on Cloudflare.
• Add a blog with Emdash once you want traffic.

Here is a prompt to get moving. Paste it into Claude Code, swap in your idea, and let it plan with you before it builds:

Help me plan and build [describe your app idea in one line].

I'm using Claude Code, with GSD for planning, Clerk for auth, Stripe for
payments, Neon for the database, and Cloudflare for hosting.

Before writing any code, ask me the questions you need to plan it properly.
Then give me a clear, step-by-step build plan.

The tools, in one place

Everything I recommended, with links:

• Claude Code (claude.com/claude-code): your AI dev environment.
• GSD (Get Shit Done): the planning framework I add on top.
• Wispr Flow (wisprflow.ai): talk instead of type.
• Clerk (clerk.com): logins, free for most projects.
• Stripe (stripe.com): take payments.
• Neon (neon.tech): your database.
• Cloudflare (cloudflare.com): hosting, storage, and domains.
• Emdash (the Cloudflare write-up): a blog on Cloudflare.

You do not need anything else to start. Open a folder, type claude, and describe what you want to build. That is the whole barrier now.

Where this goes next

This playbook is the foundation. The full course takes you through it hands on, building real projects start to finish: a Chrome extension, a landing page and blog on Cloudflare, and a full AI-powered SaaS with auth, payments, and a database.

After that, there is more coming:

• Building a mobile app, taking what you have built to iOS and Android.
• Advanced tactics, the growth, ranking, and scaling playbook.

I am keeping the rest under wraps for now, but founding members lock in the lowest price and get every future module free.

This is the system. The next step is using it.