SaaS Development

Why SaaS products fail at the infrastructure layer, not the idea layer

Most SaaS ideas are good enough. What kills them is underestimating the complexity of the platform layer — the auth, the billing edge cases, the team and permission system, the audit logs, the customer admin panel. These aren't glamorous features but they're table stakes for any product charging a subscription.

Stripe alone has a dozen integration footguns — trial periods, proration, dunning, webhook idempotency, upgrade/downgrade flows. Get any of these wrong and you're silently losing revenue or creating billing disputes with your best customers. The same goes for multi-tenancy: one misconfigured query and a user sees another org's data.

Building SaaS right requires someone who's been through the launch cycle before and knows which corners cut now will hurt later.

How I build SaaS products that are ready to grow

I build the platform layer the same way for every SaaS project, so the foundation is solid before we touch product features.

• NextAuth or Clerk for authentication that handles magic links, OAuth, and team invitations without custom code
• Stripe Billing with proper webhook handling, customer portal, and usage-based billing support
• Row-level security with organisation scoping so tenant isolation is enforced at the database level
• Admin dashboard with user management, subscription overrides, and support tooling from day one

The goal is a SaaS product that's ready to pitch investors, onboard paying customers, and scale without needing a platform rewrite at 1,000 users.