Best Practices for Building a SaaS Product – Part I

Define the Core

In a competitive market, focus on mastering core functionalities rather than reinventing the wheel; for a food‑delivery app, authentication may be outsourced while order management and delivery tracking require careful consideration.

User Authentication

Reuse existing authentication providers such as Google or Facebook and consider omitting email registration to avoid building custom login, registration, and password‑reset forms.

Email Notifications

Transactional emails are essential; use low‑cost email APIs but be aware of IP reputation issues, data‑privacy regulations like Schrems II, and the need for multi‑tenant support for custom domains.

Multi‑Tenant

For B2B SaaS, isolate each customer with logical partitions or separate databases to simplify code, reduce risk, and ease data deletion; for B2C, a single logical database may suffice but can become cumbersome as user count grows.

Authorization

Role‑based authorization is common; store authorization rules in a controllable customer database rather than tying them to the authentication service to maintain separation of concerns.

Payments

Outsource payment processing entirely, using invoicing as the data interface to keep integration simple and allow future switching between payment providers.

Hosted Backend API

Choose cost‑effective, easily replaceable, and scalable infrastructure such as serverless platforms (e.g., Google Cloud Run) to host Docker containers, accepting the occasional cold‑start latency for the benefit of per‑request billing.

Database Technology

Move away from traditional RDBMS to document‑oriented NoSQL databases like MongoDB or RavenDB, which align with object models, reduce impedance mismatch, and improve developer productivity.

Hosted Database

Use cloud‑hosted database services for persistence, noting higher costs and limited free tiers; alternatively, self‑host a small VM with a community‑licensed instance for early users before migrating to serverless solutions.

Background Processing

Offload asynchronous workloads such as data processing, external webhook handling, and internal event handling to serverless functions combined with a message bus; Google Cloud Run, Azure, or AWS provide suitable services.

Part One Summary

Key checklist: define core business idea, identify B2B/B2C model, add authentication providers, select an email service for transactional mail, use invoicing for payment integration, host stateless APIs with serverless tech, adopt document‑oriented databases, host databases on small VMs or managed plans, and set up a message bus with serverless functions for internal events.

Looking Ahead

Part Two will cover UI frameworks, code design, security, DevOps, and other SaaS‑related topics.