PHP SaaS

PHP SaaS development for products customers pay for monthly

We build subscription software for founders and for companies turning an internal tool into a product. Tenancy, billing and onboarding are planned at the start, so the first paying customer does not force a rewrite.

  • Makers of our own LMS product
  • Tenancy and billing planned upfront
  • NDA on request
Get a free quote See our work
What is included
  • Tenant isolation
  • Billing and invoices
  • Sign-up and first run
  • Entitlements and quotas
  • Admin back office
  • Queues, email and monitoring
Get a free quote Reply within one business day. NDA on request.
The problem

What catches SaaS founders off guard

A SaaS product is two applications in one. There is the thing customers pay for, the scheduling tool or the reporting dashboard or the course platform. And there is the machinery around it that nobody sees in the demo: accounts that keep each customer's data apart, plans and limits, card payments that fail and retry, trial expiry, invoices, and a back office for your own support staff.

Founders tend to budget for the first and discover the second halfway through. We plan both from the start. This page is stack-neutral within PHP and explains the decisions every SaaS build has to make. If you have already settled on a framework, Laravel SaaS development describes how we implement the same ideas with that framework. For the business side of the question, see SaaS product development.

  • Tenancy was an afterthought

    The prototype was built for one customer. Now every query needs a filter added by hand, and one missed filter would show a customer data that belongs to somebody else.

  • Billing edge cases pile up

    Upgrades in the middle of a month, failed renewals, refunds, coupons, tax and annual plans. Each one is a small feature, and together they are a project nobody estimated.

  • Support works from the database

    There is no back office, so answering "why was I charged" or extending a trial means a developer running SQL on production. That stops working after a handful of accounts.

  • Plans exist on the pricing page only

    Marketing promises three tiers with different limits, but the code has no idea which plan an account is on. Limits are enforced by trust.

What we do

The machinery behind the product

We build and maintain our own LMS product and plugins, so the unglamorous side of running software for paying users is familiar ground. Around the features unique to your product, we build these six.

Tenant isolation

A shared database with tenant scoping, a database per tenant, or a mix, chosen from your customer profile. Isolation is enforced centrally and covered by tests that try to cross the line.

Billing and invoices

Stripe or a comparable provider handles cards, invoices and tax. Our code keeps plans, trials, upgrades and cancellations in sync through verified webhooks, never through the browser redirect alone.

Sign-up and first run

Registration, email verification, workspace creation, team invitations and a first-run checklist that gets a new account to its first useful result quickly.

Entitlements and quotas

Features and quotas defined as data and checked through one entitlement service. Changing what a plan includes is a configuration change, not a code hunt.

Admin back office

Search accounts, view subscription state, extend trials, apply credits, impersonate a user with an audit record, and suspend abuse. Your support team never needs database access.

Queues, email and monitoring

Background workers for slow tasks, transactional email with proper domain authentication, error tracking, uptime checks and alerts that reach a person.

Typical projects

SaaS builds we take on

01

A first version of a new product

The smallest product worth charging for, with sign-up, one or two plans, card billing and a back office, built so later features do not require rework of the foundation.

02

Productizing in-house software

Software you built for your own company, reworked for many customers: tenancy added, hard-coded assumptions removed, branding per account and a billing layer on top.

03

Billing and plans added to an existing app

A working PHP application that is invoiced by hand today, given self-service subscriptions, plan limits, payment reminder emails and a customer billing page.

04

Single-tenant installs consolidated

Many separate copies of an application, one per customer, merged into one multi-tenant platform with a migration path for the data of each existing customer.

In depth

Tenancy, billing and growing in stages

Three ways to separate tenants

The first decision is where the data of one customer ends and the next begins.

  • Shared database, tenant column. Every table carries a tenant ID and every query is scoped by it. Cheapest to run and simplest to deploy. The risk is a forgotten filter, so scoping must be automatic and tested.
  • Database per tenant. Strong isolation, easy backup and export for a single customer, and a clean answer for clients with strict data requirements. The cost is running schema changes across many databases.
  • Hybrid. Shared by default, with dedicated databases for the few large customers who need them.

Most products should start shared and keep the hybrid option open. We make tenant resolution, by subdomain, custom domain or account switcher, a single component so the storage choice can change later.

Keeping payments and access in step

The payment provider is the source of truth for money, and your application is the source of truth for access. They are kept in step by webhooks, which arrive late, out of order and sometimes twice. We verify signatures, store each event, process it idempotently and reconcile nightly. The customer returning from the checkout page is treated as a hint and nothing more. Failed renewals trigger a grace period and reminder emails before access changes, because locking out a customer over an expired card is an easy way to lose one. Where Stripe is unavailable or a poor fit, the same structure works with Paddle, Razorpay or PayPal.

One service that says what an account may do

Scattering "if plan is pro" checks across the codebase is the mistake we see most. Instead, each plan is a set of entitlements: features switched on, and quotas such as seats, projects or storage. The application asks one service whether an account may do something, and usage is counted as it happens. New plans, grandfathered plans and one-off deals for a large customer then need no deployment.

Which PHP foundation to build on

A SaaS product leans on queues, scheduled tasks, mail and authentication from its first week, which is why most of ours start on Laravel. Other bases are sound too. An API-first product with a JavaScript front end can run lean on Slim or Symfony components. An existing plain PHP application can become a product without a rewrite, by adding tenant scoping at its data layer and a billing module beside it. We choose from what you already have and who will maintain it.

What each growth stage needs

A new product does not need a cluster. Stage one is a single well-configured server running PHP-FPM, the database, a queue worker and backups you have restored at least once. Stage two moves the database and workers onto their own machines and adds Redis for cache and sessions. Stage three puts several application servers behind a load balancer with object storage for files. PHP makes this path straightforward because requests share nothing by default. What must be right from the first commit is the set of assumptions in the code: no files on local disk, no sessions tied to one server, no slow work inside a request.

Process

From idea to paying accounts

  1. 1

    What you sell and to whom

    We go through your users, the core feature, the pricing model and any compliance needs, and agree what the first chargeable version contains.

  2. 2

    Architecture decisions

    Tenancy model, billing provider, hosting stage and framework are chosen and written down with their trade-offs before design starts.

  3. 3

    Foundation first

    Accounts, tenancy, plans, billing in test mode and the back office are built first, so every later feature is tenant-aware and plan-aware from birth.

  4. 4

    Your own features

    The screens that make your product what it is are delivered in milestones to staging, with test accounts on each plan to prove limits and upgrades behave.

  5. 5

    Launch and operate

    Billing goes live, monitoring and alerts are switched on, and the first customers are onboarded while we watch webhooks, queues and error rates.

Deliverables

What you have at launch

  • Automated tests that try to cross tenant boundaries
  • Self-service sign-up, billing and cancellation
  • A back office for support and finance staff
  • Entitlements stored as data, editable by an admin
  • Monitoring, backups and a documented scaling path
FAQ

Questions from SaaS scoping calls

Does a SaaS product have to be built on a framework?
No, but in most cases it should be. Queues, mail, authentication and scheduled tasks are needed from the first week, and a framework supplies them already tested. We build small single-purpose services in plain PHP and recommend Laravel for most full products.
Which tenancy model should we start with?
A shared database with strict tenant scoping suits most new products, because it is the least expensive to run and to change. If you sell to enterprises or regulated sectors that require their data held separately, we plan for a database per tenant from the outset.
Can you work with a payment provider other than Stripe?
Yes. We integrate Paddle, Razorpay, PayPal and regional gateways when Stripe is unavailable in your country or a merchant-of-record model suits you better. The billing code sits behind one interface, so changing provider later does not mean rewriting the application.
How do you stop one customer seeing data from another?
Tenant scoping is applied automatically at the data layer, so a developer cannot forget it on an individual query. Automated tests sign in as one tenant and attempt to read and change the records of another through every endpoint. File storage, caches and queued jobs carry the tenant too.
How small can a first paid version be?
Smaller than most founders expect. One core workflow that solves a real problem, sign-up, a single paid plan or a trial, card billing and a basic back office. Everything else can wait for feedback from paying users. We help you cut the list during the free consultation.
Will the product have an API for customers?
It can, and many B2B buyers expect one. We usually add per-account API keys, rate limits and outgoing webhooks once the core product has settled, so the public contract is not built on screens that are still changing. The approach is described under PHP API development.
Who runs the servers after launch?
Either of us. We can set up hosting in your own cloud account, hand over a runbook and step back, or stay on to handle updates, monitoring and urgent fixes under a support agreement. The accounts and the code remain yours in both cases.
Related

Laravel SaaS Development

SaaS Product Development

Startups & SaaS Companies

PHP API Development

PHP Web Application Development
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