DesignKompanie

SaaS development

Built for retention, not just launch.

SaaS products designed around the metrics that matter: activation, expansion, and churn. Multi-tenant architecture, Stripe billing, and growth loops designed before a line of code is written.

ReactNext.jsStripeSupabasePostgreSQLNode.jsResend
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SaaS development

N° 01SaaS-specific challenges

Multi-tenant. Built to retain

SaaS products have a specific failure mode that consumer apps don't: churn. A product that acquires users and fails to retain them is a leaking bucket — it can never grow faster than it shrinks. We build for retention from the first architectural decision.

Multi-tenant architecture, subscription billing, onboarding flows, usage metering, and the growth loops that move users from free to paid are all first-class concerns in a SaaS build. Not features added later — foundations designed in from the start.

N° 02SaaS architecture

The infrastructure that scales

01

Multi-Tenancy

Row-level tenant isolation in a shared database, or schema-per-tenant for regulated industries. Tenant-aware querying, middleware, and the access control layer that prevents data bleed.

02

Subscription Billing

Stripe Billing or Paddle integration: plans, trials, seats, metered usage, proration, dunning, and the invoice lifecycle that keeps revenue operations sane.

03

Auth & Permissions

Email/password, OAuth (Google, GitHub, Microsoft), SAML SSO for enterprise tiers, and role-based permissions that scale from a solo user to a 500-seat account.

04

Usage & Analytics

Event tracking, feature flags, usage metering, and the admin analytics that tell you which features drive retention and which drive churn.

N° 03Growth loops

Acquisition built into the product

The best SaaS growth comes from product behaviour: virality loops, referral mechanics, and the activation milestones that predict whether a new user will still be a user in month three.

We map activation milestones and engagement events in discovery — before the UX is designed. Onboarding flows, empty states, and feature discovery are all designed against the data that predicts retention.

Product-led growth (PLG) architecture: free tier logic, upgrade prompts triggered by behaviour not time, and the billing integration that makes the moment of conversion frictionless.

N° 04Admin tooling

Operate it without an engineer

A SaaS product without operator tooling is one where every customer issue requires an engineer. We build the admin panel alongside the product: account management, feature flag controls, impersonation, billing overrides, and the event log that tells support what happened.

We also build the internal analytics that matter for a SaaS business: MRR, churn, ARR by plan, cohort retention curves, and the leading indicators that predict next month's numbers before the billing run.

Selected work

Shipped, not theorised.

Hauloport admin dashboard showing carrier cost, customer revenue and gross margin per carrier
Live multi-carrier rate comparison with carrier cost hidden from the customer
Hauloport marketing site

01

Hauloport

Logistics · multi-tenant SaaS

A multi-tenant logistics platform we designed, built and operate. Role-aware dashboards for shippers, carriers, drivers and platform admins, a no-install driver app with live GPS and digital bills of lading, Stripe billing with Connect payouts on a double-entry ledger, and an admin console for compliance and reporting.

Its multi-carrier shipping module — live rate comparison across six Canadian and U.S. carriers, a private markup engine that keeps carrier cost off the customer's screen, wallet billing, and cross-border customs documents — is fully clickable in the product demo.

What we built

  • Multi-tenant PostgreSQL with tenant-scoped access control enforced on every endpoint
  • Role-based permissions across six roles, from platform admin down to driver
  • Stripe billing and Connect payouts recorded against a double-entry ledger
  • Background job worker for documents, notifications and webhook retries
  • Server-rendered PDFs — bills of lading, shipping labels, commercial invoices
  • Tokenised public tracking pages that need no login
  • Unit and end-to-end suites running in CI on every commit
Next.js 15React 19TypeScriptPostgreSQLPrismaStripeAuth.jsBullMQRedisVercel
Visit hauloport.comOpen the product demo
AdmitPortfolio marketing site showing a student portfolio page with a counselor note and a shared-with-schools badge
AdmitPortfolio live demo entry with student, counselor and admin logins

02

AdmitPortfolio

EdTech · white-label agency platform

A platform for boarding-school admissions agencies, replacing the spreadsheets, shared drives and chat threads those agencies run on. Three roles, one login each: agency admins run operations from a dashboard with completion rates, a service-line mix and a live activity feed; counselors mentor an assigned caseload with inline, threaded feedback on essays and every portfolio section; students build a structured thirteen-module portfolio with document, image and video evidence.

Every student gets a polished public page at their own memorable URL, with public, unlisted or school-only privacy, that an agency shares with schools as the deliverable. The whole thing is white-labelled to the agency's name and logo, and a live demo with admin, mentor and student logins is open on real sample data.

What we built

  • Three server-enforced roles: admin, mentor and student each see only what they should
  • Mentor access scoped to an assigned caseload, never the whole roster
  • Thirteen-module portfolio builder with typed fields and evidence upload
  • Threaded, inline feedback on essays and sections, with full history
  • Public student pages at a custom URL with public, unlisted or school-only visibility
  • Admin approval gate before any portfolio is shared with a school
  • Service-line and enrolment management, counselor and guardian assignment, CSV export
  • White-label branding per agency, no engineering team needed on their side
Visit admitportfolio.comOpen the live demo
LaycanDesk enquiry desk ranking candidate vessels for a 45,000 tonne steel billets stem with TCE, route and sanctions screening
LaycanDesk marketing site

03

LaycanDesk

Maritime · AI chartering desk

An AI chartering desk for small dry-cargo broking and operating shops. It reads every cargo circular and open-tonnage email that lands in the inbox, turns it into a structured market board, matches each stem against the ships in the shop's own book, prices the voyage on a deterministic TCE estimator, screens the counterparty and vessel, and drafts the offer, in about ninety seconds, before the enquiry goes cold.

The big platforms show brokers the market. LaycanDesk answers it, privately: it is a desk, not a marketplace, and nothing a shop forwards is ever shared with another company. Set-up is one email forwarding rule. A live demo runs on an anonymised steel-billets case with fictional ships.

What we built

  • Email ingestion through Cloudflare Email Routing into a signed ingest endpoint
  • LLM extraction with structured output, a cheap first pass escalating to a stronger model below a confidence threshold, every result landing as pending for one-click approval
  • Corrections stored as tomorrow's evaluation set, so extraction improves on the shop's own mail
  • Matching engine that ranks the book's vessels against each stem on position, dates, size and gear
  • Deterministic voyage estimator, TCE, laytime and bunkers, unit-tested against hand-worked vouchers
  • Counterparty and vessel screening with sanctions and AIS checks surfaced on the desk
  • Multi-tenant Postgres with row-level security forced on every tenant table, isolation tests per migration
  • Money and quantities stored as integers, laycans as date ranges, port times in the port's own timezone
Next.js 15TypeScriptSupabasePostgreSQLTailwind v4Claude APICloudflare WorkersVercel
Visit laycandesk.comOpen the live demo

Investment

Fixed scope. No drift.

From $28,000 — focused SaaS MVP.

  • Multi-tenant architecture with plan-gated feature flags
  • Stripe Billing integration — plans, trials, seats, dunning
  • Auth with OAuth and SAML SSO for enterprise tier
  • Admin panel with account management and impersonation
  • Onboarding flow designed against activation milestones
  • 30-day defect warranty after launch
Request a quote →

Questions

The answers we give most often.

Do you build both the product and the marketing site?
The product (authenticated app) is our primary scope. Marketing sites are a separate engagement — we can build them or scope them as an add-on. Both are fixed-price.
What billing infrastructure do you use?
Stripe Billing for most projects — it covers plans, trials, seats, metered billing, and dunning. Paddle for products that want a merchant of record to handle global tax. We assess which is appropriate in discovery.
How do you handle the free tier vs paid tier logic?
Feature flags gated by plan, usage limits enforced at the API layer, and upgrade prompts triggered by behaviour. We design the free-to-paid conversion flow as a UX discipline, not an afterthought.
Can you integrate with our existing data warehouse?
Yes. Segment, Mixpanel, Amplitude, BigQuery, Snowflake, and custom analytics pipelines are common integrations. We assess the data model in discovery.
How long does a SaaS MVP take?
A focused SaaS MVP (core feature set, auth, billing, basic admin) runs ten to fourteen weeks. A v1 with growth loops, admin analytics, and enterprise SSO runs sixteen to twenty-four weeks.
What does it cost?
SaaS MVPs start at $28,000. Full v1 products with enterprise tier features start at $70,000. Fixed-scope proposals after discovery.
How do we start?
Use the contact form with a description of the product, your target user, and your pricing model. We'll respond within two business days.

Start here

Tell us about the product.

The pricing model, the retention metric you're trying to move, and where you are today. You'll get a reply from the person who would run the build — scope, fixed price and a date, not a sales sequence.

Or email hello@designkompanie.com

Reply within two business days.

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Next step

SaaS products that acquire and retain.

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