The Problem
B2B SaaS founders were drowning in disconnected spreadsheets, Stripe exports, and Mixpanel dashboards just to answer one question: is the business growing? Existing tools either cost $500/mo before you have revenue, or required a data engineering team to set up.
The core pain: no single source of truth for the metrics that actually matter — MRR, churn, LTV, and activation rate — all in one place, updating in real time.
The Solution
Nexus is a self-hosted analytics platform that ingests events directly from your product, joins them against Stripe billing data, and surfaces the metrics founders care about. The entire setup takes under 15 minutes.
Key decisions:
- Event pipeline built on Redis Streams — tolerates bursts, no message loss, horizontally scalable
- Prisma + PostgreSQL for the data layer, with a materialized view strategy that makes dashboard queries sub-100ms even at millions of events
- Recharts for visualizations, wrapped in a custom component system that keeps chart config DRY across the whole app
- Next.js App Router with React Server Components — the dashboard shell loads instantly, data streams in progressively
The UI was designed around a single principle: answer the question before the user finishes typing it into Slack.
The Outcome
- Dashboard cold load: ~400ms on Vercel Edge
- Event ingestion throughput: 12,000 events/sec sustained on a $20/mo VPS
- Reduced the "time to insight" for pilot users from 45 minutes (manual spreadsheet) to under 30 seconds
- 3 paying beta customers within the first week of launch
- 800+ GitHub stars, featured on Hacker News front page