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Saas for Startups
Playbooks and case studies covering saas for startups.
What Does It Cost to Add AI to Your Onboarding Flow
Most AI onboarding quotes fall between $18K and $180K, and vendors rarely explain the gap. The single biggest driver isn't the model — it's whether your product already emits the behavioral events an AI can act on.
What to Ask a Dev Partner Before You Sign the SOW
The clause that sinks most startup builds is not the payment schedule — it is how 'accepted' gets defined. Here are the 17 questions to ask your dev partner in the 48 hours before you sign.
How to Read a Dev Partner Proposal Before You Sign
Three proposals for the same MVP can vary 40–60% in price without any of the vendors being wrong. Here is how to tell whether the cheapest bid underspecified the work, whether the priciest one is padding your risk, and which line item actually matters most.
Moving On-Premise to Cloud: The Case Your CFO Will Sign
Your on-premise server is quietly costing more than you think — in support contracts, sysadmin time, blocked enterprise deals, and an ICO exposure window your CFO hasn't priced in. Here's the business case that gets signed.
How to Run a Paid Discovery Before You Commission a Build
A paid discovery that ends without signed acceptance criteria and a revised fixed-price proposal is not a discovery — it is a deposit. Here is the process a SaaS founder should run before committing £60–150k to a build.
Your MVP Is Not the Product. The Handoff Is.
Most founders think the MVP is done when the features work in a demo. It isn't. The real deliverable is a system a stranger can operate, extend, and debug without the original team on speed dial.
Enforce Row-Level Tenancy in Postgres Without a Middleware Tax
A hands-on tutorial for backend engineers who want tenant isolation enforced at the database layer, not in application WHERE clauses. Includes the set_config trick that avoids the RLS performance penalty most teams blame on the feature itself.
Rate-Limit a Multi-Tenant API Without Punishing Good Tenants
One free-tier tenant shouldn't be able to spike your p99 and take down enterprise customers sharing the same limiter. Here's a runnable per-tenant sliding window in Redis, with the sorted-set logic that makes boundary bursts impossible.
Monolith vs. Microservices: A Decision Framework for Growing SaaS
Deployment pain and merge conflicts feel like a signal to split your monolith. Often they are a signal to fix your monolith. Here is how to tell the difference.
Retry Failed Jobs in Postgres Without a Queue Server
You don't need Redis or Sidekiq to stop losing background jobs. Postgres 9.5+ ships with SKIP LOCKED, which is enough to build a concurrent job queue with retries, exponential backoff, and a dead-letter state in about 100 lines of SQL and Python.
Multi-Tenant Data Isolation: The Cheatsheet
A dense reference for SaaS CTOs who need to answer enterprise security questionnaires about how tenant data is isolated. Covers row-level security in Postgres, schema-per-tenant, database-per-tenant, attack surfaces, and the migration-velocity tradeoffs nobody warns you about.
Supabase vs. Firebase vs. PlanetScale: Pick the Right BaaS
Choosing between Supabase, Firebase, and PlanetScale isn't about features or DX — it's about where your relational complexity will live once multi-tenancy and row-level security show up. Here's how to decide before you re-platform.