Auth, workspaces, RBAC, Stripe subscriptions, SSO-ready. I build the tedious infrastructure right the first time so week five is your first paying customer, not another sprint of plumbing.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
You're a technical founder with a validated B2B idea. You know multi-tenancy, subscription billing, and RBAC need to be right from day one, because a mid-GTM rewrite doesn't just cost money — it costs the deal you're closing when it happens.
The pain today
- Open-source SaaS boilerplates that need three weeks of cleanup before a real feature ships
- Making the schema-per-tenant vs row-level tenancy call under pressure with no data
- Stripe subscription logic that breaks on mid-cycle seat changes and proration edge cases
- SAML SSO demanded by your first enterprise prospect — six months after launch
- Workspace-switching bugs that surface when a user belongs to two tenants at once
The outcome you get
- Complete multi-tenant shell in 4 weeks: auth, workspaces, billing, RBAC, Stripe
- Tenancy model chosen with data and compliance context, not gut feel
- Stripe subscriptions with proration, mid-cycle seat changes, dunning, and tax
- SSO-ready architecture so enterprise doesn't force a rewrite at customer 15
- PostgreSQL row-level security so a missed WHERE clause doesn't become a data leak
Why most B2B SaaS MVPs stall before customer ten
Multi-tenant SaaS development isn't hard because the concepts are complicated. It stalls because founders underestimate the surface area of infrastructure you have to get right before the first real customer signs. Auth alone means email/password, magic links, invite flows, workspace switching, and a session model that knows which tenant context is active at all times. Add billing, RBAC, data isolation, and audit logging and you're looking at six to eight weeks of pure infrastructure before a product feature ships — if you wire it yourself.
The alternative is an open-source boilerplate. Most of them cover 70% of what you need and leave the remaining 30% as undocumented edge cases you discover at the worst possible time. I've built multi-tenant B2B SaaS for 17 years across funded startups and enterprise customers. The shell I deliver in 4 weeks is the 100% version — the boring infrastructure done correctly so your team can build the product.
Complete multi-tenant shell in 4 weeks: auth, workspaces, billing, RBAC, Stripe
Row-level tenancy vs schema-per-tenant: how I choose
Row-level tenancy means every table carries a tenant_id column and PostgreSQL row-level security policies enforce isolation at the database layer. A single missed filter becomes a data leak, so I add application-layer middleware that injects the tenant context into every query — defense in depth. This model scales to tens of thousands of tenants, migrations deploy to all tenants in one pass, and infrastructure costs stay nearly flat as you grow. It's correct for 90% of B2B SaaS.
Schema-per-tenant gives each customer their own Postgres schema. Stronger isolation on paper, easier to produce per-tenant data exports, but migrations become per-tenant operations and the complexity grows fast past 500 tenants. It becomes the right call when you have large-dollar enterprise accounts requiring documented data residency, HIPAA BAA coverage, or SOC 2 Type II audit trails that a compliance auditor wants to inspect per customer.
I make this call with you in week one, based on your target customer profile, compliance obligations, and realistic tenant count at 12-month horizon. The decision is documented in the architecture spec so your future engineers understand the reasoning, not just the outcome.
3 weeks: From kickoff to investor demo.
Stripe subscriptions without the edge-case surprises
B2B SaaS pricing is almost always per-seat or tier-based. Stripe's Products and Prices handle the data model cleanly. The plumbing that breaks on DIY builds tends to cluster around three scenarios: a customer adds seats mid-billing-cycle and expects correct proration, a customer downgrades at period end instead of immediately, and a payment fails and you need to decide whether to suspend the workspace, retry silently, or contact a specific billing contact rather than the seat holder who happens to be first on the list.
I wire all three into the standard shell. Proration through Stripe's preview endpoint so customers see the charge before confirming. Downgrade scheduling via subscription schedule so you're not managing a cron job for delayed cancellations. Dunning with three configurable retry windows, then workspace suspension rather than deletion — subscription data preserved for win-back. Tax via Stripe Tax for US state compliance and EU VAT. The first customer churning over a $20 proration bug is a morale event; I'd rather prevent it in week two.
SSO, SCIM, and workspace switching
Day one, users authenticate via email/password, magic link, or OAuth (Google, GitHub). That carries most products to the first 30 paying customers. The architecture decision that matters is whether the auth layer can accept SAML and SCIM later without a rebuild.
I build with Clerk, Auth0, or WorkOS from day one. All three treat SAML SSO and SCIM directory sync as paid upgrade paths on top of the same auth foundation — no code rework, no new session model. When your first enterprise prospect asks for Okta or Azure AD integration (and they will, somewhere around customer 10 to 20), it's a configuration change in the auth provider's dashboard, not a sprint.
Workspace switching is the other piece founders underestimate. A consultant or agency employee might belong to three tenants simultaneously. Getting the session model right — active tenant stored server-side, tenant switching triggers a clean session refresh, no cross-tenant data bleeding — is the kind of thing that sounds simple and takes two days to get right in production. It's in the standard shell.
Case study: GigEasy multi-employer platform
GigEasy was itself a multi-tenant product: multiple employer customers managed their worker pools through the same platform, with strict data isolation between employers and unified platform operations visible only to the GigEasy team. Barclays and Bain Capital were investors; the timeline pressure was real.
The stack was Laravel, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS. I shipped the full multi-tenant shell — employer workspaces, worker user model (a worker could belong to multiple employers), RBAC scoped to employer plus role, and Stripe subscriptions per employer — in 3 weeks from kickoff to investor demo. The industry benchmark for this kind of build is around 10 weeks. The tenant model held through the investor demo and continued to support ongoing product development after.
The same choices apply to most B2B SaaS MVPs: row-level tenancy with application-layer filtering, Stripe subscriptions scoped per tenant, RBAC with tenant-aware roles. The shell is intentionally boring; the product differentiation lives on top of it.
What the boilerplate includes — and what it doesn't
Included in the standard 4-week shell: multi-tenant workspace model, user invitation flows, role-based access control, Stripe subscriptions with the edge cases covered, SSO-ready auth via Clerk/Auth0/WorkOS, PostgreSQL row-level security, per-tenant audit logging, GDPR data export and deletion pipeline, transactional email via your choice of provider, and infrastructure-as-code for Vercel or AWS.
Not included by design: marketing pages (separate Websites engagement), deep product features (your domain, not mine), analytics beyond basic product events (connect PostHog or Amplitude), complex workflow engines (Temporal, Inngest — add when the use case exists), and native mobile. Keeping that line clear is how the shell ships in 4 weeks instead of 12.
Pricing is $4,999/mo on the Standard tier. Work Made for Hire from day one — all code, infrastructure-as-code, credentials, and docs are yours at any cancellation point. 14-day money-back, cancel anytime after.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Built and shipped an investor-ready MVP from scratch
Built the entire technological base and delivered MVP in just 3 weeks, enabling a successful rapid launch and investor demo.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
Four weeks for the shell: auth, workspaces, RBAC, Stripe subscriptions, and SSO-ready architecture. That's start to first paying customer. The industry benchmark for this scope is closer to 10 weeks — the GigEasy multi-tenant platform hit investor demo in 3 weeks on a similar scope. After week four, the subscription continues as you build product features on top of the infrastructure.
Row-level tenancy is correct for 90% of B2B SaaS. It's simpler, scales cleanly, and migrations deploy to all tenants in one pass. Schema-per-tenant earns its complexity only when you have large enterprise accounts requiring documented data residency, HIPAA BAA coverage, or per-tenant audit trails for compliance. I make this call with you in week one using your actual compliance obligations and target customer profile — not a coin flip.
I build with Clerk, Auth0, or WorkOS. All three provide email/password, magic links, and OAuth on day one, then treat SAML SSO and SCIM directory sync as upgrade paths — same codebase, no session model rewrite. When an enterprise prospect asks for Okta or Azure AD integration, it becomes a configuration change rather than a sprint. Which provider I recommend depends on your pricing tier and expected enterprise pipeline.
Every personal data field is tagged in the schema from the start. The standard shell includes a per-user and per-tenant data export pipeline and a deletion pipeline that cascades correctly across all tenant-scoped records. GDPR DSAR requests and right-to-be-forgotten deletions execute in minutes. Audit log retention respects configurable policy windows — relevant for both GDPR and SOC 2 requirements.
Yes. Work Made for Hire from day one means every line of code, every infrastructure-as-code file, all credentials and documentation transfer to you on cancellation. No GPL-style viral licenses, no proprietary frameworks, no usage-based lock-in. Another senior engineer can pick up the project cleanly — that's a design constraint I build to, not an afterthought.
The dunning flow I build into the standard shell has three configurable retry windows, then suspends the workspace rather than deleting it. Subscription data is preserved for win-back. Notification goes to the billing contact configured on the account, not just the first seat holder. The workspace owner can update payment and resume without losing data or settings. Stripe Tax handles US state compliance and EU VAT automatically.