Ok, well, maybe not easy — you do still have to build the software. But Rails Kits has created a software as a service “starter kit” that provides a pain-free way to add subscription management, recurring billing, and credit card management functionality to any Rails app. At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, software as a service was a major trend, enough so that Tim O’Reilly included the SaaS trend in his latest definition of the “Web 2.0” term.
Rails Kits is the brainchild of Ben Curtis, who pulled the code for the SaaS kit from his team recruiting tool Catch the Best. The kit is a collection of premade Ruby on Rails files that can plug into an app and handle things like account creation, management, billing (via the Braintree gateway), trials, and user management.
As Curtis says, Rails Kits are more than just plugins, they are complete code bases that can act as the foundation of an application. The SaaS kit is the first kit that Curtis is offering, though others are planned.
With more and more companies transitioning their software to online web apps and charging for them as a service, simplifying that process was bound to happen. The next step? We’re sure it will be to offer Curtis’ kit (or something like it) as a service itself. Yes, that’s right, that would be Software as a Service as a Service. Makes sense, though, right?
