SaaS Handbook
An open book on managing and operating software as a service for small teams
Role: author and maintainer · 2026 – present
Links: Read online · Repository · Portuguese edition
Why I wrote it
When I started building a personal-finance SaaS on my own, things were simple: I was designing the architecture, and changing it cost almost nothing. As the product grew, every change started to have a price, and the project needed structure, above all to be ready for new collaborators. So I applied the project-management and operations practices I had used throughout my career.
That is how this handbook was born. It is a living document that matures alongside the personal-finance app and the experience I gain along the way.
What I built
A book of 14 chapters and 4 appendices (about 10,000 words), built from the practices behind 12true:
| Part | Topics |
|---|---|
| I — Management | Method, where things live, GitHub Projects, agile with iterations, documentation, people |
| II — Delivery | Code flow and PRs, the flow in VS Code, CI/CD and environments, safe migrations and feature flags |
| III — Operations | Observability, backups, incidents and postmortems, security |
| Appendices | Templates, rollout plan, reading path, glossary |
What makes it different
- The repository is its own example. The chapters point to the repo’s own GitHub Projects board, PR and issue templates, ADRs and CI workflow.
- Security by design. Every example uses Farol, a fictional SaaS, so no detail of a real system is exposed (ADR 0004).
- Bilingual, with one repository per edition.
- Open licenses: text under CC BY 4.0, code under MIT.
Stack
Quarto · GitHub Actions · GitHub Pages · Mermaid · lychee (link checking)