After 25 years building enterprise SaaS, I'm now building my own.

Every app I've ever worked on needed the same things. User management. Payments. Subscriptions. AI integration. Different industries, different stacks, different clients — and yet the foundation underneath was always the same handful of problems, solved again from scratch each time. So after a career transition earlier this year, I stopped rebuilding them and started building Wildwood.

The realization that pushed me here is one a lot of engineers will recognize. You spend the first month of nearly every project rebuilding the same plumbing before you get to write a single line of the thing that actually makes the product different. That plumbing is necessary, it's hard to get right, and it's almost never the reason anyone wanted to build the app. It's pure overhead — and it's the same overhead, every time.

What Wildwood is

Wildwood is a backend-as-a-service platform with reusable components you plug into your own apps:

  • User management
  • Multi-provider AI proxy
  • Subscription and payment processing
  • Hosted app provisioning
  • MCP server wrapper proxy
  • Component libraries for Razor, Blazor, React, and React Native
  • A Claude plugin with skills and an MCP interface, so vibe-coded apps can integrate in minutes

The idea is that the foundation stops being something you build and becomes something you plug in. You bring the part of the product that's actually yours — the feature that made you want to build it — and Wildwood brings the auth, the billing, the AI proxying, and the rest, as components in the language you're already working in.

Proven on real apps, not just slideware

This isn't a concept I'm describing from the whiteboard. Two apps are already running on it: Northway AI Coach and API2MCP. Northway is a cross-platform AI coaching app with streaming responses and multi-model switching; API2MCP turns any REST API into an MCP server. Both lean on the same Wildwood foundation rather than reinventing it, which is the best proof I can offer that the components hold up under the weight of a real product. You can read more about both in my case studies.

In beta, and open

Wildwood is in beta now. I've built the WildwoodComponents in commonly used languages — React, React Native, Razor, and Blazor — and made the code freely available on GitHub. The component libraries being open matters to me: the parts you embed in your own app shouldn't be a black box. You should be able to read them, trust them, and extend them.

There's a through-line from my consulting work to this. Twenty-five years of building the same foundations taught me exactly which ones are worth productizing — and which corners absolutely cannot be cut on security, billing, and AI integration. Wildwood is that experience compressed into something you can adopt in an afternoon instead of a quarter.

Where this goes

If you're building a product and you can feel the foundation work looming — the auth, the payments, the AI layer — that's exactly the wall Wildwood is meant to remove. And if your situation is more bespoke than an off-the-shelf component can handle, that's the consulting work I do at Kuhn Consulting: architecting and building production SaaS end to end.

Take a look at wildwoodworks.io, browse the components on GitHub, and if you want a hand putting them to work, let's talk.