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SaaS

The three things you cannot retrofit cheaply.

Almost every SaaS rewrite we are called into has the same cause. Tenancy, billing and permissions were added after the first ten customers, at the point where changing any one of them means changing all three at once, on live data, with customers on it. Nothing about the framework choice caused that. Building those three first is unglamorous and it is the whole difference.

What makes this different

The problems that are specific to this sector.

Tenancy decided late is tenancy decided badly

How a tenant is isolated shapes the schema, the queries, the caching and the export path. Deciding it in month six means rewriting everything built in months one to five.

The first enterprise deal changes the product

SSO, role granularity, audit logs, data residency, a security questionnaire. These arrive together with the biggest contract you have been offered, and the answer cannot be six months.

Billing edge cases outnumber billing

Proration, mid-cycle upgrades, seat changes, failed payments, dunning, refunds. The happy path is a week; the rest is why finance stops trusting the numbers.

What we build for saas

  • Multi-tenant architecture with isolation enforced in the data layer, not in code someone must remember
  • Subscription billing through Stripe: plans, seats, proration, dunning, and invoices that reconcile
  • A permission model your sales team can explain, plus SSO and SCIM for enterprise buyers
  • Audit logging built before the first compliance questionnaire arrives, not after
  • Admin and support tooling, so customer issues stop routing through engineering
Talk about a project

What shapes the build

Requirements we design against in this sector. These describe obligations that apply to systems like yours — they are not claims that we hold a certification.

  • SOC 2 readiness, which enterprise procurement asks about earlier every year
  • GDPR obligations that follow your customers' customers, covering deletion, export and processor terms
  • Data residency, once you sell into Europe or to a public-sector buyer with a jurisdiction requirement
  • Uptime commitments, which turn into a real engineering budget the moment they are in a contract
Questions

The ones this sector actually asks.

Can you take over a SaaS someone else built?

Often, and it depends on what is underneath. We read the code before quoting, and if rebuilding the tenancy layer costs less than untangling it, that is what we will tell you, including when it is the larger number.

How long to a sellable v1?

It depends on how much of the tenancy, billing and permission work is genuinely needed for your first ten customers. We scope it in phases with an exit after each, so the decision to continue is made repeatedly rather than once at the start.

Do we own the code?

In full, including the infrastructure definitions. No runtime licence, no hosting you are locked into, and nothing that prevents another team picking it up.

What is the most expensive thing your team still does by hand?

Tell us, and we'll tell you honestly whether software can fix it, and roughly what it would cost. No pitch deck.