SaaS development: the parts that make it a business, not a demo

Anyone can build the feature. A SaaS is what surrounds it — tenants that cannot see each other, plans with limits that are actually enforced, billing that survives a failed card, and an admin your support team can use at 2am.

Custom software SaaS products AI development Web applications AI chatbots Nearshore teams

Overview

App with logins, or actual SaaS

A SaaS is the machinery around the feature: tenancy, billing, limits, onboarding and an admin your support team can survive.

What makes software a SaaS rather than an app with logins

A SaaS is the machinery around the feature: tenants that cannot see each other, plans with limits enforced in code, billing that survives a failed card, onboarding that works without a call, and an admin panel your support team can use at 2am.

Skip that machinery and you have an application you cannot sell repeatedly. Most rescues we take on in this category are products that grew from a single-customer build and hit tenancy on customer number three.

When to build multi-tenant from day one

When you intend to sell the same product more than a handful of times. Retrofitting isolation into live customer data is the most expensive mistake in this category — roughly a third more up front buys you out of it entirely.

Signals you are building a SaaS, not a project

the same product will be sold to more than a few customers;
pricing depends on seats, usage or plan tiers;
customers expect to sign up without talking to you;
each customer wants small configuration differences, not forks;
support will need impersonation and an audit trail.

Price

From $35,900

Timeline

2–3 months

Payment

By milestone

Checklist

The SaaS checklist we build against

Seven areas where products get stuck a month after launch, in the order they usually go wrong.

What ships with a v1

Tenancy. Isolation model chosen deliberately — row-level, schema or database — enforced server-side and covered by a tenant-crossing test suite.

Billing. Plans, seats, usage metering, trials, dunning, proration, tax. Stripe or Paddle depending on where your buyers are and who should be merchant of record.

Limits. Plan entitlements enforced in code, not in the marketing page.

Roles. Organisation, team, member, invitations — and SSO when the first enterprise deal arrives.

Onboarding. Self-serve from signup to first value, instrumented so you can see where it breaks.

Admin. Impersonation with an audit trail, refunds, plan changes, feature flags.

Observability. Per-tenant errors and performance, so you find out before the customer emails.

Multi-tenant v1

From $35,900

Timeline

2–3 months

Single-tenant tool

From $18,900

Decision

Merchant of record, briefly

This decision is cheap now and expensive to change once you have paying customers in thirty countries.

Question

Stripe directMerchant of record (Paddle)

MoR (Paddle / Lemon Squeezy)Your own Stripe account

Sales tax and VAT

Yours to register and file, per country

Handled for you

Fees

Lower percentage

Higher percentage, fewer filings

Best for

Enterprise invoicing, few large customers

Global self-serve, many small ones

Chargebacks

Yours

Theirs to fight first

Availability

Not offered in every country of registration

Wider country coverage

We implement either, and we will tell you which one your business model implies. Note that Stripe is not available to companies registered in every country — sometimes that alone decides it.

Cost

What a SaaS product costs

Multi-tenancy, billing and limits are the expensive part — and the part that is painful to retrofit.

Architecture week

$4,490

Tenancy model, billing model and the limits, decided before code

1 week

Single-tenant tool

From $18,900

One customer per deployment: the cheaper answer when you have five clients, not five hundred

6–8 weeks

Why teams choose us for this

Four things we can prove, not four adjectives.

Tenancy decided deliberately

Row-level, schema or database isolation chosen on your risk profile and covered by a tenant-crossing test suite — not left to whoever writes the next query.

Billing that survives reality

Trials, proration, dunning, failed cards and tax. We implement Stripe or a merchant of record depending on who your buyers are.

Limits enforced in code

Plan entitlements live in the application, not in the marketing page, so an upgrade path actually exists.

Admin your support team can use

Impersonation with an audit trail, refunds, plan changes and feature flags — the tooling that decides how expensive support becomes.

Industries

What we buildfor your industry

We build SaaS for the domains we know: logistics, property, e-commerce operations and B2B services.

18 sectors

IT companies and digital agencies
Insurers and brokers
Lenders and microfinance
E-commerce
Wholesale and distribution
Manufacturing
Freight and forwarding
Clinics and medical centres
Dental
Car dealers and service centres
EdTech
Legal and consulting firms
Equipment rental
Real estate agencies
Property developers
Travel and events
Beauty and wellness
Construction and renovation

FAQ

SaaS questions

Including the accounting one nobody wants to ask their developer.

How much does it cost to build a SaaS?

From $35,900 for a multi-tenant v1 with billing and roles. The tenancy model and billing complexity drive the number far more than the feature list does.

Can we start single-tenant and go multi later?

Yes, if the data model anticipates it — which is how we build by default. Retrofitting isolation into a live product is the most expensive mistake in this category.

Stripe or Paddle?

Enterprise invoicing: Stripe. Global self-serve with tax handled for you: Paddle. We implement either.

Can development costs be capitalised?

In many jurisdictions the build phase can be capitalised while research and post-launch maintenance are expensed. We give your accountant a phase breakdown of hours so they can make that call — the call itself is theirs, not ours.

How do you handle per-tenant customisation?

Configuration and feature flags first, code forks never. If a customer genuinely needs custom code, that is a services engagement with its own price.

What about SOC 2 or ISO certification?

We build the controls that make an audit possible — access logs, change management, backups, reviews. We do not sell the certificate itself, and the boundary is written into the SOW.

2–4×

faster on the code-writing share

in 3 weeks

from idea to MVP

230+

projects delivered

17 years

of engineering experience

Work