What is SaaS?

In practice

The first version is perhaps a third of the work. The rest is everything that makes it a service: sign-up, tenant separation, permissions, billing and dunning, support tooling, status and incident communication, data export, and the ability to deploy a fix without downtime. Products that skipped those arrive at their first fifty customers and stall.

Where it fits in a build

Building a SaaS product makes sense when the same problem exists in many organisations in a similar enough shape to serve with one system. If every customer needs meaningful differences, what you have is a consultancy with a codebase, and it should be priced that way.

Common mistakes

• Costing the build and not the operation, which is the larger number over three years.
• Deferring tenant separation, which becomes a rewrite rather than a change.
• No self-service export, which makes procurement nervous and churn expensive.

Related terms

• Multi-tenancy
• Minimum viable product (MVP)
• Observability

Working on something that involves this?

ASTACKRA designs and builds AI systems, automation and custom software for businesses that need technology shaped around their own workflow. If this term turned up in a proposal and you want a straight answer about whether it applies to your situation, ask us — no obligation, and we will tell you if the answer is no.