6 June 2026 · 4 min read
Isolation model
Shared tables with a tenant column is the cheapest and the most common. Schema-per-tenant costs more operationally but answers enterprise security questionnaires more easily.
Choose deliberately and write the reasoning down. The wrong default discovered at your first enterprise deal is expensive.
Billing is not a bolt-on
Plans, trials, proration, upgrades, downgrades, and dunning all touch your data model. Adding them later means backfilling entitlements across live accounts.
Model entitlements separately from plan names, so pricing changes do not require code changes.
Permissions before customers ask
Organisation-level roles, invitations, and audit logs will be requested by the first customer with more than twenty seats. Building them under deal pressure produces the worst version.
A simple, correct RBAC model early beats a flexible one designed under a deadline.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing SaaS architecture for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us