Case Study / Shipped SaaS
SoundSauce
Hear a sound. Leave with the preset.
Producers spend hours reverse-engineering sounds from YouTube tutorials and sample packs. SoundSauce collapses that: upload any audio clip and get back a free preset for the Vital synth that recreates the sound, plus a breakdown of how it was made. Built solo as a complete SaaS, from the DSP analysis to the Stripe billing.
- Uploadany clip, any source
- Separatestems via Replicate
- Detectinstruments via Gemini
- AnalyzeDSP in Web Audio
- Generatea Vital preset file
Under the hood
A whole product, not a demo.
The audio brain
- Stem separation through Replicate so a full mix breaks into analyzable parts
- Gemini classifies what instrument it's hearing before analysis starts
- Web Audio API extracts the waveform, filter curve, ADSR envelope, and modulation
- Output is a real .vital preset the producer opens in their synth
The SaaS around it
- Supabase auth, storage, and Postgres with row-level security across 22 migrations
- Stripe subscriptions gating a freemium Pro tier
- A social layer: profiles, follows, likes, comments, and sound-design challenges
- PostHog, Sentry, web-vitals, Playwright and Vitest suites, CI on GitHub Actions
The honest coda: SoundSauce shipped in spring 2026, had its launch moment on the Vital community's corner of Reddit, and settled into quiet. It stays live as a working product and as proof of range, the whole stack of a modern SaaS, built and operated by one person.