Full-stack platform for real estate agents — production-ready, automated backups, monitored and scaled.
A real estate agent wanted to track properties, leads, showings, and outcomes in one place — but every off-the-shelf CRM either cost $300/mo or required a full team to administer.
The brief: build something custom-fit, host it cheaply, make it usable on a phone in a car between showings, and don't make me babysit it.
Built the smallest possible Flask app that does the job — no React, no microservices, no Kubernetes. Server-rendered HTML with light JavaScript only where it matters (mobile-friendly autocomplete on the property search).
SQLite as the database. People underestimate SQLite for production B2B apps — for a single-tenant SaaS with <100 GB of data, it's faster, simpler, and easier to back up than Postgres. Daily snapshots to a 7-day rolling backup with integrity checks.
Exposed via Cloudflare Tunnel so there's no public IP, no firewall config, no Let's Encrypt rotation. The tunnel handles TLS + DDoS + cache. Cost: $0/mo on the free plan.
Mobile-first because the actual use case is a phone in a car. The web app feels like a native app on iOS — full-screen, no chrome, big tap targets.
If you're paying $200-500/mo for a SaaS tool that doesn't quite fit your workflow, there's a good chance a custom-built alternative pays for itself in 6-12 months — especially for niche businesses where the SaaS tool's roadmap doesn't match yours.
The lock-in story isn't "build everything yourself" — it's "build the thin layer that's actually your competitive advantage, buy the rest."
Start with a free 30-min call — figure out fit before money changes hands.