We build SaaS platforms for founders who've outgrown no-code, agencies who've been burned by under-engineered MVPs, and teams who've earned the right to a properly-architected product. End-to-end — architecture, design, backend, frontend, deployment — and a partnership that survives launch.
Building a SaaS is hard. Building one that survives its first 100 customers is harder. Here's what we see go wrong — and why we exist.
Built fast, hard-coded with the first customer's name in the database, no multi-tenancy, no auth layer, no billing. Works for the demo. Falls over on customer #11 because adding a tenant means writing migrations and copying environment variables.
The build was fine. The handover was not. No documentation, no architecture diagrams, no test suite, no CI/CD, no runbook. The first bug after launch takes a week to fix because nobody knows where anything lives. The agency is "happy to help" — for retainer fees, not warranty.
Bubble, Webflow, Airtable. Brilliant for validation, terrible at 1 000 users. Re-platforming after product-market fit is technically possible but operationally brutal — and the rebuild eats 4–6 months your competitors will spend acquiring customers.
"Just add Stripe at the end" — except SaaS billing isn't just charging cards. It's plan changes mid-cycle, proration, dunning, failed-card retries, trial→paid conversion, usage metering, taxes by region. Bolting on billing late is harder than building it from day one.
These aren't features — they're foundations. They're what separates "a SaaS that works in a demo" from "a SaaS that runs a business". Every Sitect build ships with all six, baked in from day one.
Every record knows which tenant it belongs to. Every query enforces tenant isolation. No cross-tenant data leaks possible by construction.
Email + magic-link + Google/Microsoft SSO + per-tenant roles + permissions. SAML/SSO ready when you upgrade an enterprise customer.
Stripe Billing (or Paddle/Lemon Squeezy/Yoco-recurring), plan tiers, proration, trials, dunning, customer self-serve portal — production-grade.
Terraform-defined AWS infrastructure, GitHub Actions pipelines, automated migrations, blue-green deploys, env-based config — from day one.
Sentry, Datadog APM, structured logs, custom dashboards, on-call alerts. The day a bug hits production, you know within minutes — not next-day.
POPIA aligned, audit logs, encrypted at rest, secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, daily backups, runbook for breach response.
We make boring, well-understood choices because you're hiring engineering, not novelty. Here's the stack we default to for SaaS builds, and the reasoning behind each layer.
Next.js 15 with App Router + server components. Inertia.js + Vue 3 where the team prefers Vue. Tailwind CSS + shadcn for a fast design system. React Native for mobile.
Laravel 12 on PHP 8.2+ is our default — mature, productive, batteries-included. Node.js (Hono / NestJS) for I/O-heavy real-time workloads. Both deploy the same way.
PostgreSQL as default (better JSON, partial indexes, RLS). MySQL when the team prefers. Redis for cache + queues. OpenSearch for full-text. S3 for media + exports.
AWS Cape Town (af-south-1) as default — SA data residency, POPIA-friendly latency. ECS Fargate for containers, RDS for databases, ElastiCache for Redis, Terraform throughout.
Sentry for errors, Datadog (or self-hosted Grafana) for APM + dashboards, structured JSON logs into CloudWatch + queryable store. SLO-driven alerting.
Stripe Billing is our default — best SaaS billing primitives anywhere. Paddle when you need MoR. Yoco recurring for ZAR-only SA SaaS. Webhook-driven, fully reconciled.
Beyond the 6 foundations, here's the next layer of capability — features we've shipped many times and can roll into your build.
Invite teammates, accept invites, manage seats, billing-aware seat-limits, role-changes, ownership transfer.
Real-time usage counting, soft/hard limits per plan, usage-based billing dimensions, customer-facing usage dashboards.
Versioned REST or GraphQL API, auto-generated OpenAPI docs, API key management, rate-limiting per plan.
Webhook subscriptions for customers, signed deliveries, retry with backoff, delivery log + manual replay UI.
Immutable audit trail of every meaningful action — for compliance, for customer support, for debugging "who deleted X?"
Real-time toasts, notification centre, email digests, customer-configurable preferences, fan-out via queues.
CSV/Excel export of every important entity, scheduled exports to customer S3, import wizards with validation + error reports.
Per-tenant custom domains (with auto-SSL), brand colours, custom logos, customer-facing email templates.
LLM-powered search, summarisation, generation. Sitect's AI core wired in correctly — with audit-logging, approval gates, cost tracking.
SaaS builds are real engineering projects with explicit go/no-go gates between phases. You see weekly progress, and you can pause or pivot at any phase boundary.
Founder workshops, user-journey mapping, feature scoping. We produce a 30-page product brief, a Figma user-flow map, and a "Phase 1 vs later" feature matrix. Outputs are yours regardless.
Repo, CI/CD, AWS infrastructure via Terraform, auth + tenancy + billing skeleton, observability stack. A first "hello world" tenant is live behind a feature flag.
Iterative 2-week sprints, demos every Friday, weekly retros. Each sprint ships at least one shippable user-visible feature behind a flag, plus the backend behind it.
Stripe Billing wired up properly. Plan tiers, proration, trials, dunning. Customer self-serve portal. Tested end-to-end with real cards.
Load test, security review (internal penetration test), POPIA review, performance tune. 5–10 design-partner customers onboarded into private beta.
Public sign-up open, marketing site cut-over, monitoring + on-call ramp-up. 90-day defect warranty with weekly check-ins. Deliberate handover to your team.
You own the code, the infrastructure, the docs, the accounts. We deliberately design for hand-off — your team or any competent agency should be able to take over.
Every line MIT-licensed, pushed to your GitHub. Branching strategy, PR conventions, and code-review playbook documented in the repo README.
Every AWS resource defined in code, environment-specific configs, secrets in Secrets Manager, full disaster-recovery runbook.
C4-model diagrams, ADRs for every major decision, OpenAPI specs, ERDs, sequence diagrams — all versioned in the repo.
Unit tests on domain logic, integration tests against real DB/Redis, Playwright E2E tests on critical user flows. CI gates enforce passing tests before merge.
Sentry, Datadog (or Grafana), dashboards, SLO definitions, alert routing to your on-call. You see issues before customers do.
Every defect we ship, we fix free for 90 days. We pair-program with your team, review their PRs, and deliberately exit only when you're confident running solo.
Indicative figures from recent SA SaaS builds, measured 12 months post-launch. Built-right SaaS doesn't just work today — it absorbs the next 18 months of growth without rebuild.
Every SaaS build is estimated bottom-up after a 2-week discovery sprint — these tiers are the bands we usually land in. 25% on signature, 25% on phase-2 demo, 25% on private beta, 25% on launch.
Honest answers about cost, risk, ownership, hand-off, and how to know if a custom SaaS is genuinely the right call.
Send us a paragraph on what you're building, who's it for, where you are today. We'll come back with a 45-minute product call, a recommended tier, and an indicative budget — and an honest "build later" answer if that's the right call.