Building Scalable SaaS Platforms: Architecture Decisions That Matter
Key architectural decisions for building scalable SaaS platforms. Multi-tenancy models, data isolation strategies, subscription billing, and the infrastructure patterns that support growth from early customers to enterprise scale.
Architecture Decisions You Cannot Change Later
SaaS platform architecture decisions made in the first months of development determine the scalability ceiling, operational cost structure, and data isolation guarantees of your product for years to come. Retrofitting multi-tenancy, changing your data isolation model, or re-architecting for horizontal scaling after launch is orders of magnitude more expensive than getting it right from the beginning.
The foundational decision is your multi-tenancy model. Shared database with tenant identifiers is cheapest to operate but requires disciplined query scoping and limits data isolation. Schema-per-tenant provides stronger isolation with moderate overhead. Database-per-tenant offers the strongest isolation and enables per-tenant geographic data residency but increases operational complexity. The right choice depends on your tenant data sensitivity, regulatory requirements, and expected tenant count — a SaaS platform serving ten enterprise clients has fundamentally different needs from one serving ten thousand SMBs.
Beyond multi-tenancy, critical architecture decisions include your subscription and billing model (Stripe, custom), feature gating mechanism, tenant onboarding automation, and infrastructure scaling strategy. redskios has built SaaS platforms across these models using both .NET and Laravel, and we help founders and product teams navigate these decisions based on their specific market, regulatory, and growth scenarios.