Service · App development

Custom Software as a Service (SaaS) development.

Building your own SaaS product: multi-tenant, with self-service onboarding, subscriptions and compliance from day one. For founders and product leads who do not want to integrate a tool, but want to build and sell their own software to customers.

Multi-tenantSubscription billingSelf-service onboardingEU data residency

A SaaS product is not a project, it is an ongoing engine.

Setting up a SaaS product means building a single application that you sell, manage and continuously develop for many customers at once. That is fundamentally different from a one-off project: you are not delivering a single client a finished result, you are launching a product line that runs for years and must handle new users, new subscriptions and new functionality every month. Architecture, billing, support structure and compliance have to carry that from the very beginning.

We build custom SaaS for founders who want to keep control of their own product. No white-label template, no all-in-one platform that dilutes what makes your product distinctive, but your own codebase with a multi-tenant architecture, a billing layer that fits your pricing model and an onboarding flow that suits how your target audience buys. For the broader context of custom software across iOS, Android and web, see our page on app development, of which SaaS is a specific variant.

We work for clients in B2B software, professional services, specialist niches and regulated industries. For each combination of market, pricing model and compliance requirement, there is a different right answer to questions like "how many tenants will I have?", "how will I invoice?" and "where may the data be stored?". So the first conversation is not about framework choices, but about your customers and your business model. Technology comes after that.

Who we build SaaS for.

Not every organisation starts from the same place. We work on SaaS projects with four recognisable profiles. If you see yourself in one of them, the tone of our conversation will probably feel right.

Founders

First SaaS product of a new business

You have market insight, an initial design or a paying pilot customer, and now want to build a production-ready SaaS product that can scale. We work closely with the founder(s) and build from the business model back to the architecture.

Spin-offs

Productising an internal solution

Your organisation has already built something internally that would also be valuable to other businesses. We help turn the working prototype into a sellable SaaS, with multi-tenancy, billing, onboarding and the accompanying product marketing layer.

Product leads

Overhauling an existing SaaS product

Your current platform has outgrown its original design: technical debt, an unmanageable billing flow, or multi-tenancy that was never quite finished. We build replacement components or a complete next-generation version, with a migration path for your existing tenants.

Industry associations

Specialist niche SaaS

An industry body, umbrella organisation or professional association that wants to provide its members with a software product of their own. Often deep domain knowledge, sometimes regulatory requirements, and always a specific user group that you know better than any generic supplier.

What we build for your SaaS.

A SaaS product breaks down into four layers, each of which needs its own attention: the product itself, the multi-tenant foundation, the commercial layer and operational management. We build them as one coherent whole.

The core · the functional heart of your product

Product application

The actual functionality your customers pay for: dashboards, workflows, integrations with their own systems. We work from user stories and business flows, not from a feature matrix. For the business variant, we also look at our approach to B2B apps, because SaaS for business users places different demands on onboarding, authorisation and integrations than a consumer app does.

User flowsDomain modellingAPI-firstScalable UI
The foundation · multi-tenant architecture

Multi-tenant platform layer

How you run a hundred, or a thousand, separate customers on a single application without their data, performance or branding ever overlapping. Tenant isolation via Postgres row-level security or schema-per-tenant, per-tenant branding, feature flags and custom domains. For the full architecture discussion, see our separate page on a multi-tenant platform; that block is standard in every SaaS we build.

Row-level securityTenant onboardingFeature flagsCustom domains
The engine · commercial layer

Subscription billing and self-service

Creating, upgrading and pausing subscriptions, giving discounts, trials, annual contracts, measuring MRR, dunning and direct debit. We integrate with Stripe or Mollie, or build our own billing layer if your pricing model falls outside what they support. For heavier payment flows, such as marketplace payouts or complex SCA flows, we work from our approach to a payment platform.

Stripe / MollieTrials & free periodsMRR reportingDunning
The operation · operations, support and ongoing development

Management layer for your SaaS

A SaaS lives or dies by what happens after the first deployment. Tenant-aware monitoring, an audit trail per tenant, an admin console where your support team can intervene for each tenant, canary releases that let you show new features to a single pilot tenant first, and migrations without downtime. For the wider platform context, this fits within our approach to a digital platform; SaaS is one specific implementation of that.

Audit trailTenant monitoringAdmin consoleCanary deploys

What you get at the end.

A production-ready SaaS product, plus everything around it needed to run, sell and develop it yourself. No black box, and no vendor lock-in on an architecture only we understand.

You receive the full codebase under your own control, running on a cloud account in your name, with documentation that helps your own team or any future partner carry on. We work with a mindset of portability: the software should keep working without us.

  • Production-ready SaaS applicationProduction and staging environments, running in your own cloud (AWS, GCP or Azure) or with a Dutch provider offering EU data residency, with a multi-tenant foundation from day one.
  • Working billing and onboarding flowSelf-service sign-up, email verification, plan selection, payment, automatic invoicing and a customer portal in which subscribers manage their plan, invoice history and payment method.
  • Admin console for your own teamAn internal console in which you create tenants, override subscriptions, switch features on or off per tenant, investigate support tickets and export data. No more SSH into the database for routine tasks.
  • Codebase, architecture and runbookFull source code, architecture documentation and an operations runbook describing how you release, how you handle incidents and how you onboard new tenants.
  • Compliance packageA DPIA at the start, GDPR-compliant data processing, an audit log per tenant, encryption in transit and at rest, a data processing agreement template for your customers and a security test in the final sprint.
  • Management and development agreementsAn ongoing management contract with a fixed monthly fee and clear response-time commitments, or handover to your own team. Often a combination: we handle further development while your team handles day-to-day management.

When your own SaaS is the right choice.

Not everything that comes in as a "SaaS idea" is a good starting point for a platform of your own. Here are four patterns in which a custom SaaS really pays for itself.

Market insight

You see a gap that generic tools do not fill

Existing software in your market feels too broad, too foreign or too expensive. You have a more specific answer, and your first pilot customers confirm it: the pain is concrete and the willingness to pay is there.

Scalable business model

You want to build recurring revenue

Your current services are project-based, and you want predictable monthly income. A SaaS product with subscriptions is then a rational move, provided you accept that the business model takes years to mature.

Proven internally

You already have something that works

A tool is already running within your organisation that colleagues or sister companies use every day. That is the best starting point for a SaaS: proven value, a live target group and a first roadmap that comes from actual use, not from a spreadsheet.

Niche with depth

You serve a market that generic players overlook

The large SaaS players focus on broad, horizontal problems. Your market is vertical or subject-specific, and there specialist knowledge beats breadth. Your own SaaS product is often a lasting, defensible position there.

Not yet sure about a large project?

Test your idea first: a working prototype in 1 day

With OneDayBuild, we turn your idea into something tangible in one day for €1,150, so you can see whether further development is worth the investment. Decide to go ahead with the full build? Then we credit the full cost.

Explore OneDayBuild →

Stack, integrations and compliance.

We are not dogmatic about a single stack. The choice of framework, database and cloud provider depends on what your team already knows, the scale we expect and which compliance requirements apply. For SaaS we usually build in TypeScript on Node, with a React or Astro frontend and Postgres as the database, as that is where most of the community, the best talent and the most proven multi-tenant patterns are.

For data residency we work by default with EU regions; for stricter compliance requirements we can build on a Dutch provider such as TransIP or Hostnet. We build vendor-independent: you get code that can also run on another cloud if you want to move in years three or five. No architecture that only works on one proprietary platform.

  • Backend & APITypeScript on Node (NestJS, Fastify, Express) or Python (FastAPI, Django), depending on your team. API-first, REST or GraphQL, with OpenAPI specifications so that integrations with other systems are straightforward.
  • Database & tenant isolationPostgres with row-level security for shared-schema multi-tenancy, or schema-per-tenant for stronger isolation. Per-tenant encryption keys via AWS KMS or Azure Key Vault where compliance requires it.
  • FrontendReact, Astro or Svelte with a theming layer in which each tenant gets its own logo, colour palette and email templates. Server-side rendering where SEO or performance requires it, otherwise a SPA.
  • Identity & SSOAuth0, Keycloak or a custom identity server, with SSO per tenant (Azure AD, Google Workspace, Okta) alongside standard accounts. Magic links and social login where they fit, MFA and passkeys for security-sensitive tiers.
  • Billing & subscriptionsStripe Billing or Mollie for SEPA direct debit, with webhooks to your own domain model. MRR tracking, dunning, discounts, annual contracts and free trials as first-class concepts in the billing layer.
  • ObservabilityOpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog or Sentry, always with a tenant label on metrics, traces and errors, so that an incident affecting one tenant does not disappear unnoticed among the rest.
  • Compliance & GDPRDPIA for every engagement, a GDPR-compliant data model with right to erasure and per-tenant data export, a data processing agreement template, encryption in transit and at rest. EU residency by default, NIS2 preparation for essential sectors.
  • CI/CD & deploymentsGitHub Actions or GitLab CI, with canary releases per tenant, automatic rollback when error rates rise, zero-downtime database migrations and feature-flag-gated rollouts for risky changes.

How a SaaS engagement works.

1

Introduction

A no-obligation conversation to understand what you want to build, for whom, and with which business model. No pitch, but we will probe the assumptions that will shape the architecture: who your first tenants are, what the pricing model looks like, and which compliance requirements are realistic from day one.

2

Planning & product definition

A short working period in which we sharpen the scope: which functionality belongs in version one, which we deliberately leave for later, and which architectural choices are fixed. At the end you receive a substantiated plan with a working screen flow, a chosen multi-tenant approach and a first pilot tenant.

3

Development in sprints

A working build every sprint, with the multi-tenant foundation, billing and core functionality added step by step. We test early with several test tenants to rule out data isolation issues, billing edge cases and onboarding flow problems before going live with real customers.

4

Pilot launch

First one pilot tenant goes live, with a direct feedback line to your product team and to us. Then a second and third, and then broadly. This keeps incidents small, lets your own team learn along the way, and hardens the onboarding flow in practice rather than on a spreadsheet.

5

Maintenance & further development

Ongoing management for security patches, monitoring and stability, plus a product roadmap that evolves alongside your customers. SaaS is a product, not a project. We work to a release rhythm that suits how quickly your market and your team move.

Frequently asked questions.

What founders and product leads usually want to know before starting a SaaS project.

What does it cost to build a SaaS?
That depends on the scope, the chosen multi-tenant approach, the number of integrations and your compliance requirements. A first version with one clear flow and a built-in billing layer is fundamentally different from a platform with SSO, custom domains, regulated data and multiple tiers. We work in fixed sprints with budget certainty, not open-ended hourly billing, and we start with a pilot tenant so you can see quickly what works before investing further. In the first conversation we give a substantiated estimate of the overall order of magnitude.
How long before something is live?
A working first version with one pilot tenant can be ready within a few sprints; a production-ready SaaS platform that can onboard dozens of tenants independently requires several additional sprints. From the first sprint we work with a running staging environment, so you can follow progress and steer it, rather than waiting three months in silence for a delivery.
Will I own the code?
Yes. You receive the full source code, running on a cloud account in your name, with documentation and a runbook. No vendor lock-in to a proprietary platform only we understand. If you want to move to another partner in year three or five, that is arranged both technically and legally. We value long-term collaboration based on quality, not dependence.
How do you handle multi-tenancy in practice?
For most SaaS products we build on a shared Postgres with row-level security and a tenant context as a first-class concept in every API call. For heavier compliance requirements we can use schema-per-tenant or even database-per-tenant. Which architecture fits depends on your expected number of tenants, data sensitivity and compliance requirements, and we write a substantiated recommendation in the planning phase. More depth on that trade-off is available on our page about a multi-tenant platform.
Which payment integration do you use?
Stripe Billing for subscriptions with international card payments, or Mollie if you want SEPA direct debit or iDEAL flows. For more complex setups, such as marketplace payouts, jurisdiction-specific flows or a custom billing domain model, we work from our approach to a payment platform. In all cases the subscription domain rules (trials, discounts, annual contracts, dunning) remain in your own codebase, not hidden inside a vendor.
What about GDPR, EU data residency and NIS2?
Standard EU residency: your data stays within European regions, using AWS Frankfurt or Ireland, GCP Belgium or the Netherlands, or a Dutch cloud provider where that is a hard requirement. At the start we carry out a DPIA and supply a data processing agreement template for your customers. Audit logging per tenant and encryption in transit and at rest are standard. NIS2 applies to essential and important entities in specific sectors. For that context, we build the additional organisational and technical measures in from the outset rather than bolting them on afterwards.
Do you work with our internal IT or product team?
Almost always. We run knowledge transfer in the final sprint, deliver architecture documentation and an operations runbook, and agree clear responsibilities for maintenance. For the operations layer, you can choose ongoing support from us, handover to your own team, or a combination where we handle further development and your team handles day-to-day running. We work with portability in mind: the software must keep working without us.
What is the difference between a SaaS and another custom app?
A SaaS product is sold to multiple customers and must therefore be multi-tenant, with subscriptions, self-service onboarding and an operational layer for ongoing maintenance. A typical custom app is for a single organisation, with one owner, one environment and one release cadence. We build both, but the architecture and business model are fundamentally different. For the broader context of our approach to apps, see app development.

Talk to us about your SaaS.

A free, no-obligation half-hour introductory call. We listen to what you want to build, ask follow-up questions about the business model and the tenant realities that matter, and give direction you can use, even if the honest advice is not to start building your own SaaS just yet.

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