—Service
SaaS Development
Subscription platforms, onboarding flows, billing, permissions, and scalable architecture.
01Overview
Subscription products live or die on reliability and clean account management. We build the onboarding, billing, permissions, and dashboards that a SaaS product depends on, on an architecture that holds as the customer base grows.
02How we approach it
A subscription product starts with its commercial model, so that is where we start. During Discover and Define we map how customers sign up, what each plan permits, how billing changes mid-cycle, and where tenant data must be isolated. The plan structure, permission model, and architecture are settled before any code exists, because these are the decisions that are expensive to reverse once customers are paying.
Design concentrates on the two journeys that decide whether a SaaS product keeps its customers: onboarding and the daily working view. In the Engineer stage, billing is treated as a state machine driven by payment-provider webhooks, not by optimistic assumptions in the interface. Contracts between frontend and backend are typed, every input is validated against a schema, and tenant isolation is enforced in the data layer rather than left to application code to remember.
Validation for SaaS means exercising the paths that only appear in production: failed payments, mid-cycle upgrades and downgrades, cancellations, expired cards, and duplicate webhook deliveries. We test them deliberately rather than waiting for a customer to find them. Deployment runs through staged environments, and observability is in place before the first customer signs up — so when something misbehaves, the logs answer the question.
A SaaS product is never finished; plans change, features ship, pricing evolves. The Evolve stage exists for exactly this. Because the system is typed, documented, and version-controlled, new plans and permissions are controlled changes rather than rewrites, and improvements go out through the same staged pipeline as the original build — whether we make them, or an in-house team does.
03Suitable for
- Early-stage SaaS products
- Subscription businesses
- Tools moving to a recurring model
04Problems solved
- Brittle billing logic
- Painful onboarding
- Architecture that won't scale with customers
05Deliverables
- Subscription and billing flows
- Onboarding and account management
- Usage and permission models
- Scalable application architecture
06Technical considerations
- Webhook-driven billing state
- Tenant data isolation
- Observability from day one
07Common questions
What determines the cost of a SaaS build?
We don't publish prices, because two SaaS products with the same headline description can differ enormously in scope. The main cost drivers are the complexity of the billing model, the number of roles and permission levels, the integrations required, and how much administration tooling the business needs behind the product. Tell us what you're building through the contact or project brief form and we'll set out scope and cost in a written proposal.
How do you handle subscription billing?
Billing state is driven by webhooks from the payment provider, so the application always reflects what has actually been charged rather than what it expected to charge. Upgrades, downgrades, failed payments, and cancellations are handled as explicit states with defined behaviour, and we test those paths before launch — billing bugs are the fastest way for a subscription product to lose trust.
We already have an MVP. Can you build on it?
Yes, and it's a common starting point. Discover then includes a review of the existing codebase alongside the commercial goals, so we can tell you honestly what can be kept, what needs rework, and what should be replaced. Sometimes the right answer is extending what exists; sometimes a component is cheaper to rebuild than to repair. Either way you get the reasoning, not just the recommendation.
What happens after launch?
The system goes live with monitoring, logging, and documentation already in place — Deploy and Evolve are stages of the process, not afterthoughts. From there you choose: we can maintain and develop the product on an ongoing basis through our technical maintenance service, or hand it to an in-house team with a structured handover. Either way, the code is documented, typed, and version-controlled, so the product doesn't depend on us being in the room.
Who owns the code and the product?
Deliverables, ownership, and service commitments are defined in the written engagement agreement each project signs before work begins, so there is no ambiguity about who holds what. The agreement covers the codebase, accounts, and infrastructure access, and we walk through it with you before anything is signed. If you have specific requirements — investor due diligence, for instance — raise them early and we'll reflect them in the agreement.
08Related
- API Development
Secure APIs, third-party integrations, data synchronisation, and custom service connections.
- Technical Maintenance
Monitoring, updates, issue resolution, security maintenance, and controlled improvement.
- Performance Optimisation
Core Web Vitals, loading speed, caching, code splitting, and database efficiency.
- See it in practice: Atlas
A saas analytics platform concept study from our work gallery.
Discuss a saas development project.
Tell us what you need. We'll tell you how we'd build it.