How it works
The provider runs the application, the database and the infrastructure, and ships updates to everyone together. Customers sign in through a browser or an app. Most SaaS products are multi-tenant: all customers share the same code, and the application keeps each customer's data separate. Accounts, roles, billing and notifications are built into the product. For our approach, see SaaS platform development.
What a SaaS product needs
- Tenant isolation: one customer must never see another customer's data.
- Accounts and roles: who can see, change and delete what inside each customer's account.
- Subscriptions and billing: plans, trials, upgrades and failed payments.
- Reliability and monitoring: when a shared system fails, every customer feels it.
- Security from the start: run threat modelling early and protect sign-in with multi-factor authentication.
An example
Imagine a scheduling tool for small clinics. Each clinic is a tenant with its own staff, patients and calendar, all running on one shared platform. A new feature is released once and every clinic receives it. This is a hypothetical example, not our work.
Common mistakes
- Adding tenant isolation late, after the data model is already built around one customer.
- Hard-coding plans and prices, which turns every pricing change into a code change.
- Having no audit log, so nobody can say who changed what.
- Ignoring how customers will import and export their data.