CASE STUDY

Example buildSaaS Product

SaaS Subscription Starter

Sign-up, workspaces, plans and recurring billing — the unglamorous half of a SaaS product, built once and properly.

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Type
Multi-tenant SaaS
Build time
About 9 weeks
Platforms
Browser, any device
Starts at
₹20,000*

This is an example build. HumansOfCoding is a new studio with no client work to show yet. This page describes how the project would be scoped and built — the same thinking you would get on a real one. Nothing here is a past client, and no number on this page is a result.

THE SITUATION

What's actually broken.

A founder has a genuinely good idea for a tool and a clear first customer. What stands between them is the part that is identical in every SaaS product ever built: accounts, workspaces, invitations, roles, plans, trials, card failures and invoices.

None of that is the product. All of it has to be right, because getting billing or data isolation wrong is the kind of mistake that is discovered by a customer rather than by you.

  • Every customer needs their own separated data

  • Billing, trials and downgrades all have to agree

  • One customer's heavy usage slows everyone down

  • Adding a teammate should not need a developer

VERSION ONE

What we'd build first.

Every item here earns its place by being something a real user would miss on day one.

Accounts and workspaces

Sign up, verify, create a workspace, invite teammates. One person can belong to several workspaces without a second account.

Roles that actually restrict

Owner, admin and member, enforced on the server. A permission check that only hides a button is not a permission check.

Plans and trials

A free trial with a real end date, paid plans, upgrades, downgrades and the awkward states in between — expired card, failed renewal, cancelled but still inside the paid period.

Recurring billing

A payment provider handles the card. We handle what happens to the customer's access when a charge succeeds, fails or is refunded.

Tenant isolation

Every query is scoped to a workspace at the data layer, not by remembering to add a filter. This is the part that must not be a convention.

DELIBERATELY NOT IN V1

What we'd leave out.

Not because these are bad ideas. Because each one is designed better once the first version has told you something.

  • Usage-based and metered pricing. Start with flat plans; metering is a project on its own and is easier once you know how people use it.
  • SSO and SAML. Enterprise customers ask for it. You do not have enterprise customers on day one.
  • An admin back-office with everything in it. Start with the three screens support actually needs.

UNDER THE HOOD

How it's put together.

App
Next.js, so the marketing pages and the product share one codebase and one deployment
Backend
Node with Postgres, workspace isolation enforced with row-level security
Billing
Stripe or Razorpay subscriptions, driven entirely by webhooks rather than by what the browser reports
Auth
Email and password plus Google, with sessions that survive a server restart
Email
A transactional provider for invites, receipts and failed-payment warnings

HOW IT RUNS

Week by week.

  1. 01

    Week 1

    The tenancy model: what a workspace owns, what happens when someone is removed, what a downgrade takes away.

  2. 02

    Weeks 2–4

    Accounts, workspaces, invitations and roles.

  3. 03

    Weeks 5–7

    Plans, trials and billing, including every failure path.

  4. 04

    Weeks 8–9

    Your actual product feature, on top of the foundation.

BEFORE YOU START

Worth knowing.

Payment providers charge per transaction and most take a cut of each subscription. That is billed to you by them, not by us, and it scales with your revenue rather than with the build.

MVPs start at ₹20,000*. Final pricing depends on features and project scope. Third-party costs — cloud hosting, domains, external libraries, APIs, app-store fees and any other paid service — are billed separately and are not included.

KEEP LOOKING

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Appointments, patient history and prescriptions in one place, with reminders that cut the empty slots.

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