SaaS Platforms

A SaaS product is a different commitment from a website. It is infrastructure you run for other people, with their data, their uptime expectations and their billing on the line every day it exists. Building one is worth it when the market for renting your idea by subscription is real. It is not worth it as a way to avoid deciding what the product actually is.

What has to exist from day one

Multi-tenancy, so one customer's data and usage never touches another's, done properly at the database layer rather than bolted on with a filter that is one bug away from a breach. Subscription billing wired to a real payments provider, with upgrades, downgrades and failed payments handled rather than assumed away. An admin surface for you, separate from the product your customers see, because you will need to see what is actually happening before they tell you.

How it is built

Next.js and TypeScript, a real database with row level isolation between tenants, and Stripe or an equivalent for billing rather than a hand rolled payments flow. Onboarding is treated as part of the product, not a form before the real thing starts, because a customer who cannot activate themselves in the first ten minutes usually does not come back.

What you own

The same as every service here. The codebase, the database, the infrastructure account. If the product succeeds, nothing about how it was built stops you from bringing on your own team, hiring elsewhere, or simply owning it outright.

Being honest about scope

A SaaS platform is the largest build on this list, and the temptation is to build every feature a competitor already has before launching. We will push back on that. The honest version of a first release is small enough to prove the idea works with real customers before either of us spends months on features nobody has asked for yet.