SaaS development in New York
If your customers include New York banks, insurers or asset managers, their IT and risk teams will look hard at your product before the business team signs. They ask about single sign-on, how users are provisioned and removed, how one customer's data is kept apart from another's, how it is encrypted and what happens to it when the contract ends. A product that answers "next quarter" to half of those can lose a deal it had already won on features.
We build the foundations those questions test: tenant isolation enforced in the database, SSO and directory provisioning through a provider rather than hand-rolled SAML, a change history customers can export, and deletion that actually deletes. Where a large customer needs its own database, we design so the move does not mean rewriting the application. Billing, plans and usage metering sit on the same organisation model, so the enterprise tier is configuration rather than a fork of the codebase.
Most software bought in New York is bought by companies that do not think of themselves as software companies. Banks, insurers, asset managers, publishers, agencies, fashion houses and property firms all run on systems that sit beside the real business: a client portal, a pricing engine, a reconciliation job, a content pipeline. Those systems rarely start from nothing. They connect to a vendor platform, a core system older than the team, and a folder of spreadsheets someone updates by hand, and the brief is usually to make all three agree.
What those companies need built follows the industry. Asset managers and insurers need client portals where a family office sees two funds and not a third, and overnight jobs that reconcile custodian, market data and order feeds before the market opens. Publishers and ad-tech firms need event pipelines whose delivery numbers agree across vendors, and front ends that stay fast under the ad stack. Property firms need apps for technicians working in basements with no signal. And founders who left one of these industries need a first version in front of a pilot customer before the interest cools.
Hiring is the constraint. Engineers here are courted by banks, big tech offices and funded start-ups at the same time, and Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in the city at about $160,000 before bonus. The shape this produces is a small in-house team that keeps the core systems running, and behind it a list of well-defined projects that nobody on that team will reach this year. That list is where we are useful: each project is a defined piece of work, it starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and the code belongs to you from the first commit.
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for New York. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included, so decisions and code review happen live with the engineer who writes the code. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so your in-house team can run what we build long after the project is finished.
We are the right fit for the defined projects your in-house team is too stretched to reach this year: a client portal, a reconciliation job, an event pipeline, a first version for a pilot customer. Senior capacity starts within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement, and agencies can ship the work under their own name.
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 New York teams.
How do you work with teams in New York?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for New York, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included. Calls, reviews and decisions happen in that window, and the rest of the conversation runs in your tools: Slack, GitHub, Linear. The person on every call is the engineer who writes your code, and the code sits in your repositories from the first commit.
Do you build for New York financial firms?+
Yes. The work is usually the systems beside the trading or underwriting desk: overnight jobs that reconcile custodian, market data and order feeds before the open, client portals where investors, brokers and their accountants each see exactly what they should, and internal tools that replace a pricing or renewals workbook only one person understands. We build them to be idempotent and traceable, so every figure can be followed back to the file it came from.
How does your rate compare to hiring in New York?+
Built In puts the average software engineer base salary in New York City at about $160,000, before bonus and benefits. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on working code.
Can you take over a system another vendor built?+
Yes. In New York that is often a client portal or an internal tool built by an agency that has since moved on, with nobody in-house who knows how it runs. We start by reading the code and running it, then write down how it works and where it is fragile before changing anything. A good first two-week piece makes the riskiest part safe and leaves your team runbooks it can use.
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.