Solutions / SaaS
Build a real SaaS, not a demo of one
Multi-tenant from the first table, plans and metered usage from the first checkout, feature gates the billing keeps honest. Describe your product — Kliv builds the company-grade machinery around it.
The case for building it
Why build this instead of assembling the stack?
The default way to build a SaaS is assembly: an auth provider, a billing SDK, a database, an email service, a feature-flag tool — five vendors before the first line of your actual product. The seams between them become your codebase: webhook handlers reconciling billing with access, sync jobs copying users between systems, and the 2 a.m. class of bug where the billing vendor says paid and the app says locked. Kliv ships the chassis as one system — tenancy, billing, entitlements, email, data — so the seams you would have spent months writing don't exist.
The chassis is undifferentiated; your product is not. Nobody chooses your app for its login page or its invoice emails — though they'll leave over a broken one. Spend the description on your domain, the thing only you know, and let the parts every SaaS shares arrive already composed. When your pricing changes — a new tier, a metered add-on, an enterprise deal — that's a sentence in a conversation, not a re-architecture.
Anatomy of the system
What a SaaS is actually made of
Strip away the product and every SaaS has the same skeleton: tenants, seats, plans, gates, meters, invoices. Kliv ships the skeleton; you describe the product around it. Here is what the system knows on day one.
Organizations
Every customer is an organization — their users, data, and billing inside one wall. Company A cannot read Company B, at the database.
Members & roles
Your customers are companies, not logins — owners, admins, and members, each seeing what their role allows.
Plans & prices
The catalog: tiers, trials, one-time unlocks, metered add-ons — your pricing page as data the system enforces.
Entitlements
The link between money and features — what this organization's subscription opens, checked wherever it matters.
Meters & usage
Usage counted against the customer's signed-in activity — visible to them, billable by you.
Subscriptions & invoices
The commercial state of every tenant — trialing, active, past due — with the invoices to prove it.
Who sees what
Rules the database enforces
- A tenant's rows belong to the tenant — cross-organization reads are impossible at the database, not filtered in the app.
- Entitlements follow billing in real time: an upgrade opens features now, a cancellation narrows them on schedule.
- The meter and the invoice are the same system — what was measured is what's billed, with nothing to reconcile.
- A failed payment starts dunning — retries and recovery emails — before any gate closes on a paying customer.
This is the part of a SaaS nobody chose to build and everybody has to: identity, tenancy, money, and the rules that bind them. When it arrives as one system, your description gets to be about your product.
The hard parts of SaaS, already solved
These aren't add-ons — they're the same platform pieces, composed.
Multi-tenant by default
When customers sign up for your app, each gets their own organization. Company A can never see Company B's data — isolation is enforced on every query at the database level, not in app code someone has to remember to write. Your own admin data lives behind a separate, internal-only wall.
Teams and seats inside your product
Your customers aren't single users — they're companies. Sign-in, roles, and per-organization sharing are part of the same identity system, so “everyone at the same company sees their company's projects” is a sentence, not a sprint.
Charge the way SaaS actually charges
Subscriptions with trials and fair proration, one-time unlocks, and usage-based pricing with meters. “A Pro plan at $20 a month, plus 2¢ per report generated” is one description — Kliv creates the products, prices, and meters for you.
Features that follow the money
Attach features to plans and gate pages, data, and functionality on them. Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel — access follows automatically, the moment billing changes. No entitlement code, no nightly sync.
Sell access to content, too
The built-in file store has access rules of its own: private, shared per organization, or behind a subscription. Premium PDFs, videos, and downloads unlock with the same entitlements as the rest of your app.
Self-serve billing, in your app
Customers update cards, switch plans, and read invoices on a billing page inside your product — and when a payment fails, Kliv retries it and emails them until it's recovered.
Ways to charge
Three ways a SaaS can charge
Pricing pages evolve — tiers split, meters appear, an enterprise deal wants an invoice. The catalog should keep up without a re-architecture.
Tiered subscription
$29–$99/month
The team choosing Starter or Pro
Feature tiers attached to plans: Starter gets the core, Pro opens the reporting, the API, the team features.
- Unlocks
- Features follow the plan — an upgrade opens them immediately, a downgrade narrows on schedule, nothing hand-toggled.
- Billing
- Monthly or annual with trials and fair proration; failed cards get retries and recovery emails before access narrows.
- Refunds
- Approval-gated — a refund is a decision, not an accident.
Usage-based
$0.05 per run
The customer whose bill should track their value
A base plan plus a meter: renders, messages, API calls — whatever a unit of value is in your product.
- Unlocks
- Usage counts against the customer's signed-in activity, visible on their billing page before the invoice ever lands.
- Billing
- Metered charges accrue and bill on the subscription's cycle — the meter and the invoice agree because they're the same system.
- Refunds
- Disputed line items resolve through the same approval flow.
One-time unlock
$500 one-time
The customer who wants the add-on, not another subscription
A lifetime module, an onboarding package, an early-adopter deal — sold once, next to the subscriptions.
- Unlocks
- The purchase grants a permanent entitlement that coexists with whatever plan the customer runs.
- Billing
- One charge, one receipt — same catalog, same billing page.
- Refunds
- The same approval-gated flow.
Before launch
The first week, before you launch
A SaaS has more machinery to prove than any brochure site — which is exactly why the first week matters.
Shape the product
Describe it: what the product does, who a customer is, the tiers and what each opens. Kliv builds the first preview with organizations, plans, and gates already real.
Make it yours
Your domain, your brand, your product's language — and a pricing page generated from the same catalog the checkout enforces.
Wire the real thing
Connect Stripe, set the real prices and trial lengths, attach features to plans, and invite your team into the operator's view.
Try to break it
Sign up as a test customer. Try to read another organization's data — watch the database refuse. Fail a card, downgrade a plan, watch the gates follow.
Then rehearse a year
In the Sandbox, with simulated money and simulated time, run your SaaS's first year before launch: trials convert or expire, a customer upgrades in March, a card fails in June and recovers, a cancellation closes the right features on the right date. You publish a business that has already run — not a hope that it will.
Build or buy
Why not just glue the stack together?
| The glued stack | With Kliv | |
|---|---|---|
| Tenancy | An auth provider's org feature plus row filters you write and re-review forever. | Organizations enforced at the database — cross-tenant reads are impossible, not filtered. |
| Billing ↔ access | Webhook handlers reconciling the billing vendor with your app's idea of who has paid. | Entitlements follow billing natively — there is no seam to reconcile. |
| Usage pricing | A metering service, a billing service, and a reconciliation job between them. | The meter and the invoice are the same system. |
| Lifecycle email | Another vendor, another template language, another webhook. | Receipts, dunning, and trial reminders built in — on your templates. |
| Time to product | Months of chassis before the first differentiated feature. | The chassis is day one; your description is spent on the product. |
Tenancy
The glued stack: An auth provider's org feature plus row filters you write and re-review forever.
With Kliv: Organizations enforced at the database — cross-tenant reads are impossible, not filtered.
Billing ↔ access
The glued stack: Webhook handlers reconciling the billing vendor with your app's idea of who has paid.
With Kliv: Entitlements follow billing natively — there is no seam to reconcile.
Usage pricing
The glued stack: A metering service, a billing service, and a reconciliation job between them.
With Kliv: The meter and the invoice are the same system.
Lifecycle email
The glued stack: Another vendor, another template language, another webhook.
With Kliv: Receipts, dunning, and trial reminders built in — on your templates.
Time to product
The glued stack: Months of chassis before the first differentiated feature.
With Kliv: The chassis is day one; your description is spent on the product.
Common questions
How is tenant isolation actually enforced?
At the database, with row-level rules. Every customer is an organization and their rows carry that boundary — a bug in a page can't leak another tenant's data, because the query itself comes back empty.
Can I combine a subscription with metered usage?
Yes — that's one plan, not two systems: a Pro tier with $0.05 per render on top. The subscription bills the base, the meter bills the usage, and the customer sees both on one invoice.
What happens when a customer cancels or downgrades?
Entitlements narrow on the schedule your policy sets — immediately or at period end — and the data stays. A returning customer picks up their organization where it stood, which makes winning them back a billing event, not a migration.
Can customers manage their own billing?
Yes — a billing page inside your product: update cards, switch plans, read invoices. When a payment fails, dunning retries the charge and emails the customer before anyone's access narrows.
Can I change pricing after launch?
Yes — the catalog is data. Add a tier, split a plan, introduce a meter; new prices apply to new checkouts, and existing subscriptions keep the terms they bought until you decide otherwise.
Is this real multi-tenancy, or accounts with feature flags?
Real tenancy: each customer organization is a first-class boundary in the database, with its own users, roles, and rows — the same multi-tenant architecture Kliv itself runs on.
Describe your SaaS. Kliv builds the rest.
Tenancy, billing, entitlements, and content — one platform, one conversation.
