SaaS Platforms

A SaaS platform is a product that many customers use on a subscription basis, usually in the browser. From the outside it looks like an ordinary web application, but underneath it has to solve problems a single-customer application does not have: separating customer data, handling plans and payments, and letting customers create accounts and manage their teams on their own. At Odysse we design and build these platforms from the foundations up.

01Foundations that are hard to add later

Most problems with SaaS platforms come from decisions made at the very beginning. If the first version was built for one customer, it later has to be reworked in places that touch the whole system. That is why we design a few things before writing the first line of code:

• Customer data separation. We choose a multi-tenant model that fits the requirements: a shared database with a customer identifier in every table, separate schemas, or separate databases for customers with special requirements.
• Authentication and permissions. Accounts, teams, roles and permissions (RBAC) are part of the data model, not a layer added at the end.
• Plans and limits. The logic of what a customer can do on their plan lives in one place, so a pricing change does not require fixes across the whole application.
• Configuration instead of code. Differences between customers are handled through settings, not separate versions of the application.

02Payments, subscriptions and onboarding

We usually hand recurring payments, invoices and plan changes to a proven provider such as Stripe. The platform keeps the logic of plans, limits and trial periods, and reacts to payment events: a failed charge, a plan change or a cancellation.

Onboarding matters just as much. If every new customer needs manual setup by your team, the platform cannot grow faster than that team. We design a path where customers create an account, invite colleagues, configure the basic settings and start using the product on their own. The operating team gets a separate admin panel to manage accounts, handle support and review how the platform is running.

03How we build the platform

We work in seven stages: discovery, strategy, design, development, testing, deployment and scaling. At the start we agree on the platform's business model, the key user scenarios and the scope of the first release. Then we design the architecture, interface and flows, and run development iteratively in a working environment.

Most often we work with Next.js and Node.js and a PostgreSQL database, which handles customer data separation and complex permissions well. Deployments run through CI/CD pipelines, and new versions are rolled out gradually so that a bug does not hit every customer at once.

Examples from our portfolio: Trade Dungeon is our in-house trading platform, and 4rom is a social platform with user accounts and a strong focus on security.

04Turning an existing application into SaaS

We often start not from scratch but from an application that works for one company and now needs to serve others. In that case we first run an audit: we review the data model, authentication, configuration and deployment process. Based on that, we plan the transition in stages, so current users can keep working while the platform gradually gains data separation, plans and self-service onboarding.

05Growth after launch

A SaaS platform is never finished. After launch we take care of monitoring, performance, security and new features planned around how customers actually use the product. Maintenance and infrastructure costs grow with the number of customers, so it is worth planning for them from the start. We write about this in our article on application maintenance costs.

More and more platforms also get features based on language models. We add them as separate modules, with control over cost and answer quality. We cover this in more detail in our article on AI in SaaS.

Planning a SaaS platform, or want to open your application to more customers? Tell us about your product model, and we will suggest where to start.