A buyer's guide to choosing a SaaS development company — what to look for, red flags, pricing models, and the right RFP questions.
Choosing a SaaS development partner is a 2–3 year decision. Pick wrong and you re-platform in year two — a six-figure penalty.
Must-have signals: shipped multi-tenant SaaS to production, owns DevOps + observability, writes typed TypeScript end-to-end, has billing/Stripe/Paddle integration experience.
Red flags: WordPress in their portfolio, no public case studies, 'designer + developer' duo for an enterprise SaaS, no security questionnaire experience.
Pricing models: fixed-scope for v1, milestone for v2, dedicated pod for ongoing. Avoid pure T&M for greenfield — incentives misalign.
RFP questions worth asking: how do you handle multi-tenant data isolation, how do you ship behind feature flags, how do you do load testing, what's your SLA for production incidents.
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