SaaS development in Birmingham
The SaaS products we hear about from the Midlands tend to be vertical: software for one trade, built by people who spent years in it. A repairs tool for housing, a job system for a particular kind of contractor, a practice tool for a type of professional firm. The domain knowledge is the advantage; the risk is a codebase that grew customer by customer, with settings that are really forks.
We help turn that into a product that scales past the first fifty customers: a multi-tenant core with isolation enforced in the database, configuration that replaces the per-customer code paths, subscription billing, and the single sign-on and activity history that larger customers will ask for. We keep the domain logic you have spent years getting right, and change the structure around it.
Birmingham's software buyers are mostly not software companies. The city runs on financial and professional services: HSBC UK's head office at Centenary Square, the Birmingham office Goldman Sachs opened in 2021 with a technology focus, and the accountancy and law firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill. What they bring us is internal systems rather than consumer products: client portals, case and matter management, reporting that currently takes a week of spreadsheets, and integrations between platforms that different departments bought at different times.
Construction, transport and manufacturing make up the rest. HS2's Curzon Street terminus and the regeneration around it keep engineering consultancies, contractors and their supply chains busy, and those firms run on drawings, inspections, documents and project controls spread across too many tools. Manufacturing brings its own lesson. The 2025 cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover stopped production at its West Midlands plants for weeks and reached deep into the supplier base, and suppliers now want business systems they can restore quickly and integrations that pick up cleanly when they come back.
The city has also watched its council's Oracle programme. The Register reports a forecast cost of £144.4 million against an original estimate of around £19 million, with the finance system still not working as intended. The lesson local buyers draw is the right one: customise less, test the money flows before go-live, and keep the people who use the system in the room. Hiring is competitive but cheaper than London, and the banks and professional firms compete for the same engineers. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026.
Working with us from Birmingham needs no adjustment on your side. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work: an integration, a replacement for the spreadsheet, a portal with a deadline, or the groundwork before your own hire starts. We add senior capacity within days, begin with a fixed-price two-week piece so you can judge the output, and work white-label under your name for agencies.
Four ways this arrives.
Then SCIM, then role mapping, then a security questionnaire. We add SAML and OIDC through a provider or your own identity stack, provision users from their directory, and keep the permission model working for the self-serve customers who never asked for any of it.
Shared tables with a tenant column and every query trusted to filter on it. We enforce isolation below the application, with Postgres row-level security or separate schemas, and write tests that try to read across tenants and must fail.
Moving from seats to usage, adding a free tier, or selling annual contracts beside monthly plans. We model plans and entitlements separately from the payment provider, meter usage into a ledger you can audit, and make proration and dunning tested code rather than a monthly surprise.
Every larger customer asks who changed what, who can reach production and how access ends when someone leaves. We build exportable audit logs, least-privilege access and change control through pull requests, so your answer is a screen, not a spreadsheet.
A multi-tenant platform scoped per organisation, with admin screens for users, access and login alerts, and a way for an administrator to view the app as any user.
Read the write-up →Asked by Birmingham teams.
How do you work with teams in Birmingham?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Birmingham morning, so stand-up and the day's decisions happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon carries on in pull requests and written updates you can read when you are back at your desk, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Birmingham law and accountancy firms?+
Yes. For the firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill we build client portals that work on a phone and ask for each piece of information once, matter and case management tools, and reports that assemble themselves instead of taking a week of spreadsheets. For accountancy practices we build AI features that pull figures from bank statements and receipts, suggest categories and put the result in front of an accountant to approve.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Birmingham?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum engagement. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. Most clients begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, which lets you judge us on working software before committing to more.
Should we replace our ERP or build around it?+
Usually build around it, at least first. Birmingham has seen what heavy customisation can cost. Most of the pain sits in the gaps between an ERP and the rest of the business, and every customisation makes the ERP harder to upgrade. We build small tools alongside it that talk to it through supported interfaces. If replacement is genuinely the answer, we will say so and set out what to test before go-live.
Shared database, separate schemas, or a database per tenant?+
Shared tables with row-level security for most products, because it is the cheapest to run and the simplest to migrate. Separate schemas or databases when a customer contractually needs isolation, data kept in a particular region, or its own backup schedule. We design so a large tenant can move to its own database later without rewriting the application, because that request usually arrives with the biggest contract.
When should we add SSO and SCIM?+
Before the deal that needs them, not in the first month. Design the user and organisation model so SSO slots in without a data migration, then switch it on when a paying customer asks. A provider such as WorkOS saves you building SAML and SCIM yourself, which rarely pays off until enterprise customers are a large share of your revenue.
Stripe, or a merchant of record like Paddle?+
Stripe gives you the most control over plans, invoices and the checkout. A merchant of record such as Paddle takes a larger fee and becomes the seller, handling tax wherever you sell. For a small team selling internationally from the start, the merchant of record is often the simpler path. We lay out both at your price point before you choose.
Can you make the product ready for enterprise buyers?+
Yes. Enterprise buyers ask for the same things every time: single sign-on, directory provisioning, roles they can define, an audit log they can export, and admin screens their IT team can use. We design those into the data model early, so saying yes to the next large customer is a configuration change rather than a quarter of rework.
What have you built that carries over to SaaS?+
Multi-tenancy, per-organisation access and admin tooling run through most of what we build. FM360 is a multi-tenant platform with all three: organisations, apps and access managed per customer, usage analytics and login alerts. Subscriptions and billing logic we build inside the product, tested like any other code rather than left to a dashboard.