SaaS development company: from first release to scale

Who our SaaS development is for

We work with three kinds of clients. Founders who have validated an idea and now need a product that paying customers can rely on; if you are still testing the idea, start with our MVP development service. Software companies that need more engineers to ship their roadmap. And established businesses that want to turn an internal tool, or a service they already sell, into a subscription product.

We also take over SaaS products that have grown faster than their code, and bring them back to a state where new features ship at a steady pace. If your customers need a phone app as well, our mobile app development team builds it on the same API.

Of our 85+ projects, 32 were for clients in the USA and 18 in Canada, and we work in English from the first call to the last release. Your product, your code and your customer data stay yours throughout.

Multi-tenant architecture, explained

A SaaS product serves many customer organizations, called tenants, from one codebase. How tenants share the platform is the first architecture decision, and the hardest to change later. The usual options are:

• Shared database: every record carries a tenant id. The cheapest to run and the simplest to update, but every query needs strict checks.
• A database or schema per tenant: stronger separation and easier per-customer backups and exports, with more work to operate.
• Hybrid: most tenants share, while large or regulated customers get their own database.

We choose with you based on your customers, their data and the questions they will ask in security reviews. Whatever the model, tenant isolation is covered by automated tests, so one customer never sees another's data.

We also plan for per-tenant settings, such as custom branding or a customer's own domain where your plans include them, and for exporting or deleting a tenant's data when a customer leaves.

Subscriptions, billing and plans

Billing touches every part of a SaaS product, so we design it at the start rather than adding it at the end. We integrate a billing provider such as Stripe or Paddle and build around it:

• Plans, trials, upgrades, downgrades and cancellations
• Per-seat, usage-based or flat plans, with limits for each
• Invoices, sales tax and receipts handled through the provider
• Retries and reminders when a card payment fails
• A billing page where customers manage their own subscription

Plan limits live in one place in the code, so you can change what each plan includes without a new release.

We also handle the cases that turn into support tickets: proration when a customer changes plan mid-cycle, grace periods, refunds and what happens to a tenant's data when a subscription ends.

Admin, analytics and the tools behind the product

Customers see the product; your team runs the business from behind it. Next to the customer-facing app we build an internal admin where support staff can find a tenant, see its plan and usage, change settings and view the app as a user to reproduce a problem, with every action logged.

For the numbers, we track product usage and subscription events and turn them into dashboards: sign-ups, activation, active accounts, churn and revenue by plan. Each customer's own admins get an area to invite users, assign roles and permissions, and export their data whenever they need it.

For larger customers we add what their IT teams ask for: an API, webhooks and single sign-on, so the product fits into the tools they already use. Feature flags let you switch a new feature on for one customer or one plan before releasing it to everyone.

Cloud native application development and scaling

We build SaaS products as cloud native applications on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud: containerized services, managed databases, queues for background work and infrastructure defined as code. Every environment, from development to production, is created the same way, and every change goes through an automated pipeline with tests before it reaches customers.

Security basics are part of the first release too: encrypted connections and storage, secrets kept out of the code, access limited to who needs it and regular dependency updates.

Scaling is planned, not improvised. We start with a simple, well-structured application and split out services only where load or team size calls for it. Monitoring, alerts and backups are part of the first release. As usage grows, our cloud and DevOps team adjusts capacity and keeps an eye on hosting costs.

How we build your SaaS product

1. Discovery: your customers, pricing model, tenancy needs and the scope of the first release, agreed in writing.
2. Design: user flows and screens for each role, from sign-up to billing to admin.
3. Foundation: tenancy, authentication, billing and the deployment pipeline, in place before the first feature.
4. Features in short cycles, each ending with a demo on a staging environment.
5. Launch: production setup, monitoring and onboarding of your first customers.
6. Growth: new features, performance work and support, as projects or with a dedicated development team.

You can follow the product on a staging environment throughout, and you decide what goes into each cycle.

To talk about your product, contact us with a short description of who it is for and where it stands today.