012 weeks
Discovery and scope
User research, tenancy and pricing model, a written scope, and a release plan in milestones.
SaaS Platform Build
A multi-tenant platform with billing, authentication, an admin, and the operational plumbing to sell subscriptions, built over four to eight months.
The buyer question this answers: Can you build my whole product?
Who this is for
- A company with a validated idea that now needs the whole product.
- A services business turning its process into software it can sell.
- A team replacing a prototype that cannot take another customer.
Phase by phase
Reference timings for a typical engagement. The written scope gives you the dates for yours.
- 023–4 weeks
Foundations
Tenancy, authentication, roles, billing integration, and the design system, deployed to staging.
- 038–14 weeks
Core product
The features customers pay for, released to staging in weekly cycles and demoed every week.
- 043 weeks
Operations
Monitoring, alerting, backups, audit logs, data export, and the support tooling.
- 052–3 weeks
Hardening and launch
Security review, load testing, performance pass, and a staged rollout to first customers.
- 0630 days
Support window
Fixes on anything we built, and a plan for the next phase.
The stack for this workflow
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Python (FastAPI) or NestJS
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Stripe
- AWS or Google Cloud
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- Grafana
- Sentry
What could go wrong
Every build has risks. These are the ones we plan for on this kind of project, and what we do about each.
Tenancy or billing decisions made late force a rebuild.
How we handle itThey are decided in discovery and built in foundations, before any customer-facing feature exists.
The first customers need things the roadmap did not include.
How we handle itWeekly cycles reprioritise the backlog. The milestone plan changes in writing, not by drift.
The platform is hard to operate once it is live.
How we handle itOperations is a phase of its own, not an afterthought, and your team is part of it.
Cost model: Dedicated team
Scope evolves as customers arrive. A dedicated team with monthly billing and a milestone plan keeps priorities honest without re-quoting every change.
No prices on this page. The scope phase ends with a written quote for your project.
From the blog
- The three architecture decisions that are expensive to reverseMost early technical decisions can be changed later at reasonable cost. Three cannot. How to recognise them, and how to make them well in the first week.
- Postgres is enough, until it is notOne database can be the queue, search index, vector store, and analytics layer for most products. The boring-stack case, and the signals that say add something.
Questions we get asked
Can we launch something before the whole platform is done?
Yes. Foundations plus the first core milestone is usually enough for a closed beta, and staging is usable from the first month.
How do you handle multi-tenancy?
Row-level isolation in PostgreSQL for most products, with schema or database isolation where compliance requires it. The choice is made in discovery.
What about billing?
Stripe in most cases, with subscriptions, trials, invoices, and dunning handled properly rather than bolted on later.
How much of our time does it take?
A product owner for a few hours a week, more during discovery and launch. Decisions are what slow a build, so we ask for them early.
Tell us what you are building.
We reply within one business day with how we would build it, what it would cost, and which engagement model fits.
- 01Tell us what you are building
A short form or an email. No deck required, and "not sure yet" is a fine answer.
- 02A call with an engineer
Within one business day. Technical questions get technical answers, from the person who would build it.
- 03A written scope and quote
Fixed price where the scope is defined. The document is yours whether or not you go ahead.