SaaS Development
SaaS products built to survive their second year.
Shipping the first version of a SaaS product is the easy part. What decides whether it survives is tenancy, billing, entitlements, and the operational tooling nobody demos. AppStartDev builds subscription products end to end, from a first paying customer to a platform with plans, limits, and a support team behind it.
Common builds
Multi-tenant applications, subscription and usage-based billing, plan and entitlement models, self-serve signup and onboarding, team and role management, admin and support consoles, customer-facing analytics, tenant provisioning, and the reporting a revenue team asks for in month three.
Decisions that are expensive to reverse
The SaaS choices that get made once.
Most of what hurts a SaaS product in year two was decided in week two, usually without much discussion. These are the ones we insist on getting right before code exists.
The tenancy model.
Shared schema, schema per tenant, or database per tenant. Each one sets your isolation story, your migration cost, and what you can promise an enterprise buyer. Changing it later means moving live customer data.
Billing state versus product state.
What a customer pays for and what a customer can reach are two different systems that must always agree. We build entitlements as their own layer so a plan change, a trial expiry, or a failed payment updates access in exactly one place.
Pricing will change.
Plans get renamed, split, grandfathered, and metered. We model pricing as data rather than conditionals scattered through the code, so a new tier is a configuration change instead of a release.
Support needs its own product.
Impersonation with an audit trail, plan overrides, refunds, usage lookups, and tenant provisioning. Without these, every customer problem becomes an engineering ticket and a direct database edit.
Migrations run without a maintenance window.
Once tenants are in different time zones there is no quiet hour. Schema changes ship backward compatible, roll forward tenant by tenant, and stay reversible until the old path is proven dead.
Customers can leave with their data.
Export and deletion built early, not bolted on for the first enterprise security review. It is also the cheapest way to prove you are not holding anyone hostage.
How we run engagements: discover, shape, build, ship & support. Read the full process →
Stacks we work with
Billing is never only a payment integration. Every SaaS build we ship separates what a customer is charged from what a customer can reach, so a plan change, a failed payment, or a manual override lands in one place instead of five.
Hire us when this is true
When you are taking a product from a single customer to many, when billing and permissions have drifted out of agreement, when onboarding is losing signups before they see value, or when a growing tenant count is making every schema change frightening.
FAQ
Can you build the MVP and keep going after it?
That is the normal shape. We scope a first release around the workflow that proves the product is worth paying for, ship it, then keep building against real usage. Most SaaS work is a long relationship, not a handoff, so we plan the codebase for the version that comes after the one you can picture.
How do you handle multi-tenancy?
It depends on the isolation your customers and your compliance story actually require. Shared schema with a tenant key is the default and fits most products. Schema-per-tenant or database-per-tenant earns its cost when enterprise customers demand hard isolation or per-tenant restore. We pick before the first table is created, because it is the most expensive decision to reverse later.
Do we have to use a specific payment provider?
No. Stripe is the common default and we work with it a lot, but we have built against other gateways and can work with whatever your finance team already uses. What matters more is the entitlement layer behind it, which stays ours regardless of who processes the card.
Building or scaling a SaaS product?
Tell us where the product is today, what the pricing looks like, and what is breaking as customers arrive.