SaaS Development Company
Building SaaS means solving three problems a single-tenant application never faces: keeping customers' data separated, charging them on a recurring basis, and enforcing what each plan allows. Get the first one wrong and it is very expensive to fix later.
Discuss your projectThe multi-tenancy decision
This is the architectural choice that is hardest to reverse, so it is made deliberately at the start rather than by default.
| Shared schema, tenant column | Schema per tenant | Database per tenant | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Logical, enforced in code and policy | Strong | Strongest |
| Cost per tenant | Lowest | Moderate | Highest |
| Migrations | One, applied once | One per schema | One per database |
| Noisy-neighbour risk | Real | Reduced | None |
| Per-tenant backup and restore | Awkward | Straightforward | Trivial |
| Reporting across tenants | Easy | Harder | Hardest |
| Suits | Many small tenants | Mid-market | Enterprise, or regulated data residency |
Most SaaS products should start with a shared schema and a tenant column, with row-level security enforced in the database rather than only in application code. Moving to schema-per-tenant later is feasible; discovering that nothing enforces the tenant boundary is not something you want to discover from a customer.
What a first release needs
Tenant isolation you can prove
Enforced at the data layer, so a missing filter in one query cannot leak another customer's records. We write tests that attempt cross-tenant access and expect them to fail.
Subscription billing
Stripe, usually, with the webhook handling that keeps your records in step with what was actually charged. Handled idempotently, because Stripe retries and a double-processed event means a double charge.
Plan entitlements
What each plan permits, checked server-side at the point of use rather than by hiding a button. Including the behaviour when a customer downgrades below what they are already using, which is the case everyone forgets.
Team accounts and invitations
Users belonging to an organisation, with roles. Almost every B2B SaaS needs this by month three, and retrofitting it means reworking every permission check.
Self-serve onboarding
Sign up to first useful action without a human. The step where most SaaS products lose the trial users they paid to acquire.
Admin tooling for your own team
Impersonation, plan changes, usage inspection, extending a trial. Deliberately built, because otherwise your engineers run SQL against production to answer support tickets.
Decisions worth making before the build, not during it
- Whether trials require a card. It changes conversion, churn and the onboarding flow substantially.
- What happens at the end of a trial — does data remain readable, or is the account locked?
- Whether billing is per seat, per usage, or flat. Usage-based billing requires metering built in from the start and is painful to add.
- How proration works on upgrade and downgrade mid-period. Stripe handles the arithmetic; you still have to decide the policy.
- Whether a customer can export their own data. We would argue yes, and that saying so plainly helps you sell.
- Where data is stored, if you intend to sell to European or regulated customers. That constrains the tenancy model.
Common questions
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