Short answer
Multi-tenant SaaS development means building one application that serves many customer organisations (tenants) from shared infrastructure, while keeping each tenant’s data, users and settings isolated. Infikey designs tenancy models, workspaces, SSO, roles, custom domains and per-tenant limits. Typical multi-tenant builds cost USD 30,000–120,000 depending on product scope and enterprise requirements.
Updated · Written by the Infikey Technologies delivery team
Choosing a tenancy model
| Model | Best for | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Shared database, tenant key on every row | Most B2B and SMB SaaS | Cheapest to run; isolation enforced in code and tests |
| Schema per tenant | Products with moderate tenant counts and custom fields | Stronger separation; migrations across many schemas need tooling |
| Database per tenant | Enterprise, regulated or data-residency customers | Strongest isolation; higher hosting and operations cost |
| Hybrid | SMB tenants shared, enterprise tenants dedicated | Flexible pricing tiers; more routing logic |
We usually start shared and design the code so large customers can move to dedicated databases later.
Multi-tenant features we build
- Workspaces and organisations with invitations, teams and switching between accounts.
- Roles and permissions that tenants can customise, plus SSO through Google, Microsoft and SAML, and SCIM user provisioning for enterprise.
- Per-tenant configuration: branding, custom domains, feature flags, plan limits and custom fields.
- Isolation safeguards: tenant scoping in every query, automated tests that try to read across tenants, and separate encryption keys where needed.
- Noisy-neighbour protection: rate limits, queues and quotas so one large tenant cannot slow down others.
- Billing hooks connected to a SaaS billing system.
Cost
| Scope | Budget (USD) | Budget (INR) |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-tenant MVP with workspaces, roles and billing | 30,000–50,000 | 25–40 lakh |
| B2B product with SSO, custom domains and audit logs | 50,000–90,000 | 40–75 lakh |
| Converting a single-tenant product to multi-tenant | 40,000–120,000 | 32 lakh–1 crore |
These are planning ranges, not quotes. Try the SaaS MVP cost calculator for your scope.
Project blueprint
Moving desktop accounting software to multi-tenant SaaS
Based on the requirements we hear most often from buyers like this.
A software vendor sells a desktop accounting product installed separately at each customer. Updates are shipped by hand, support teams connect remotely to fix issues, and customers increasingly ask for browser and mobile access.
What we would build
- Multi-tenant cloud application with a shared database and tenant scoping
- Migration tools that move each customer’s desktop data into their own workspace
- Workspaces, user invitations, roles and SSO
- Subscription plans tied to features and number of companies
- Support console with audited impersonation and per-tenant health checks
How success is measured
- Customers migrated from desktop to cloud
- Support tickets per customer before and after
- Hosting cost as a share of subscription revenue
- Time to ship an update to every customer