Ludovic Frank - Freelance developer

December 2024: the perfect time to create three new free SaaS products for small and medium-sized businesses.

ionicons-v5-k Ludovic Frank Jan 8, 2025
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Hello little wolves 🙂,

Happy New Year 2025! So, have you been spoiled for Christmas? 😁

As far as I'm concerned, in December I wanted to set myself a slightly "silly" challenge. The idea was to create three free SaaS that meet real needs that can arise in VSEs and SMEs.

In fact, you've probably already seen them... Yes, the little orange insert above the blog posts!

So, shall we talk a little more about these little SaaS and their history? Let's get started!

Creating QR Codes that can be modified after printing

Let's start with the first one to be released: LFQR.

First of all, it's worth noting that an interface-free version of this has been around for almost three years. In fact, on the menu of the Frères Marchand restaurant, as well as on their bags, there's a QR Code. These QR Codes can already be modified without having to reprint them.

But I hadn't pushed the concept so far as to create a little SaaS to manage this kind of thing, because I didn't think it would be useful to others... and yet!

The story

When you're self-employed, you're going to build up a big network. It'll take time, but over time, you'll chat with lots of different people...

And when you chat, you tell each other the latest anecdotes. I once heard one that intrigued me.

Someone in a company wanted to create QR codes to put on flyers. So she set about generating them.

On the Internet, there are platforms for creating "QR Codes that can be modified after printing"...

Except that these QR Codes only work for a certain period of time, and once that period has elapsed, you have to pay for them to continue working. The idea is to wait for them to be printed before asking for payment...

But I've got an infra that can handle that...

So I put this story in the back of my mind and went back to other things...

Later, thinking about it, I realize that I've got the infrastructure to handle it. Indeed, when a "dynamic" QR Code is scanned, a simple HTTP 302 is returned by the server.

Developing LFQR

So I decided to create a small Symfony project, keeping things simple: not a sophisticated front-end, but classic Twig. And after 24 hours, LFQR was there.

Here are a few key features:

  • Short domain name: This means less data in the QR Codes.
  • Completely free: At no point will you be asked to pay anything to use the service. It's designed to eliminate anything that costs money (and is superfluous).
  • Modification history: When you replace the URL of a QR Code, this is recorded in a history. This makes it easy to check if you've made a mistake.

First of all, LFNY is a fork of LFQR. That's right, it's all the same 😀.

Where did this idea come from?

Every year, St. Nicholas Day is a big moment in the restaurant world, and at Les Frères Marchand, it's no exception.

At the beginning of December, in order to manage the event, we put a lot of things in place, including sending an SMS to customers on St Nicholas' evening.

But the problem was that we had a lot of information to include in the SMS, and as you know, an SMS has a limited size. It's not an iMessage or a WhatsApp.

Here, it's 160 characters. Beyond that, it's more expensive.

So we created an article in the "news" section of the Frères Marchand website to give all the information, and in the SMS we put a shortcut link to this article.

The little problem

But, as you can see from the screenshot above, there was a little problem... the link wasn't very pretty.

LFNY lets you create short links with any name you like to the right of the URL.

The .fr domain name inspires confidence in people living in France, and being able to customize the right-hand side of the URL shows people "what" they're going to click on.

A simple and effective password generator

Last but not least, I'm not going to lie, it's mostly for me...

How did I do it before?

As I've been tinkering with stuff, I've often found myself needing to generate "strings", whether for passwords, secrets or other goodies.

I used to use either my password manager, or a website that generated them (I confess, I've never pushed the vice so far as to do it in CLI).

We create our own solution?

But I didn't like it. Either it wasn't fast enough, or I didn't trust the number of ads on the site (even with an adblock).

So for this one, there's no little story like for the other two. Here, it's just me who wanted to have my own password generator 😀.

Here are the features:

  • Fast and simple: in one click, you've got your password.
  • Customizable: uppercase, numbers, prefixes... the choice is yours!
  • Zero external dependency: everything happens directly on your device, with no data transmission.
  • Convenient: your preferences are saved for next time.

Conclusion

And that's it! To kick off the year, I wanted to tell you about the three new additions to the family 😁

I think there'll be more later, when I come up with some ideas, but for now, it's not bad...

See you next week, I'll have to tell you about Zebra printers 😁.