Launch and Scale Your SaaS Product with Confidence

Shared schema, in most cases — it is the cheapest to run and the fastest to build, and the large majority of SaaS products never need more. The decision to make consciously is not which model but whether you can move later, and that depends on discipline rather than architecture: route every query through one layer that applies the tenant filter, never let application code hand-write a query without it, and keep tenant identity out of your URLs and public IDs. Get that right and switching models later is a migration. Get it wrong and it is a rewrite.

Use Stripe, or an equivalent, essentially always. Billing looks like a solved problem until you meet proration on a mid-cycle plan change, failed-payment retries, tax by jurisdiction, refunds, dunning emails and the invoice a customer's finance team insists on. That is months of work with a permanent maintenance cost and no differentiation — no one has ever chosen a SaaS product because it built its own billing. What we do build is the layer between the payment provider and your product: what a plan actually unlocks, what happens the moment it lapses, and how a customer moves between tiers without losing access mid-session.

You need it when a customer asks, and usually not before — which in practice means the first enterprise deal in your pipeline. It changes the build less than people fear if the foundations are already there: audit logs that record who changed what, least-privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, and a real answer to how you would delete a customer's data. Those are worth having anyway. What SOC 2 adds is evidence and process on top of them. Retrofitting the foundations to pass an audit is the expensive path, so we put them in from the start even when nobody has asked yet.

The rebuilds we get called in for are rarely caused by traffic. They are caused by decisions that were reasonable at ten customers and are load-bearing at a thousand: sequential IDs that leak how many customers you have, permissions checked in the interface rather than in the data layer, background jobs that do not know which tenant they are running for, and no way to answer "who changed this record". None of those are expensive to get right early, and all of them are painful to change once real customers depend on the behaviour.