Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post.

As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things:

``` 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. ``` I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smart.

But at the end of the day, you spend time and money reinventing solutions already solved in other frameworks which distract from the features of your product. Elixirs libraries are growing, but they have not reached parity to near drop-in solutions found in Django for instance.

Is Django the fastest in code execution? No. Is it the most elegant? No.

But there is an outstanding catalog of existing solutions and libraries out there that a junior engineer can pull from.

Developer velocity is so much faster with a well established framework. Easy to hire for. And you spend time implementing product features instead of reinventing engineering solutions. My ideal product development workflow is to implement in Django, find the bottlenecks (if any) and then specialize those flows.

Elixir is great and beautiful, but it was much more difficult to find engineers with experience in it. I really only found engineers that had a curiosity to use it or just started using it. I was never able to find an engineer that I could hire who built and scaled a Unicorn level app with it. Something quite common to find with Django.

I'm not saying to use Django. But when starting a project, I just ask that people look at how hard it will be to find someone to help you in the future and decide if you want to spend time building product value or spend time writing beautiful code.

I am really missing out on the Elixir hype. And Phoenix has liveview, so the htmx hype gets multiplied with the Elixir hype?

This article provides a huge list of things you have to know for web dev. Certainly not all of them a required. And of the ones you will have to know to accomplish your task, you'll still have to learn the Elixir flavor of it.

My current job is rewriting what is basically a crud elixir app in python for a company. I'm not completely sure their reasons wanting it re-written, but they're spending money to do it, so they must have some justification. I have heard them mention difficulty in finding people to work on their existing codebase. A lot of companies they just want fungible (and cheap) programmers (like me).

I've really only bothered to learn enough elixir to reverse engineer the existing app for reference. I have no idea what good elixir looks like, and it could be that this is just bad elixir. Completely subjective, but it's not easy to follow. I had to work through some code where a bunch of functions were piped together, but all these functions were defined multiple times with different args (pattern matching on arguments). It seems like a strange way to do flow control within a pipeline, because the logic seems to really be spread around.

Maybe I have to sit down and write something from scratch to appreciate it.

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years.

it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, and frequently don’t go on to give a reader any idea of how the decision worked out.

here, i’ll start: i rewrote my startups platform in elixir about six years ago and it was a terrible business decision. not because elixir was bad —to the contrary, it was fantastic —but because the year and a half i spent reproducing functionality could have been spent adding new features that would have translated to new customers, and that would have translated to an additional million dollars when we eventually sold our bootstrapped business (obviously if i’m quibbling about a million bucks im not talking about a venture backed business here.)

in terms of scratching my intellectual itch it was great, but i can’t defend it from a business perspective and whenever somebody brings up the notion of rewriting a core platform i tell this story.

now can someone please write some elixir articles about cool stuff they did with it and get those on the front page?

Disclaimer: Elixir is extremely productive, Phoenix is outstanding, the community is world-class, and as a result of the Erlang VM / OTP / Beam you can remove whole parts of your traditional webstack. If you haven't tried it I cannot recommend it enough.

But!

As a long-time Elixir Developer who has gladly used it to bootstrap many applications and companies, I have to say I think this article is actively harmful to the community.

It's an extremely thinly veiled sales pitch for their "Petal Pro" paid boilerplate.

At the same time, it does nothing to address the tradeoffs of certain features like Live View. Which for the record is a poor fit if your app suffers from client-side latency or requires any kind of offline-enabled features.