What Is B2B SaaS?
B2B SaaS (Business-to-Business Software as a Service) is subscription software sold to companies, not consumers — typically with team accounts, role-based access, and per-seat or usage-based pricing.
B2B SaaS means your customers are businesses, not individuals. This changes the architecture, pricing model, and sales motion significantly.
What makes B2B SaaS different technically:
- Multi-tenancy — each customer company gets isolated data
- Team management — invite team members, assign roles
- Role-based access — admin, manager, viewer permissions
- Audit trails — who did what and when
- SSO / SAML — enterprise identity provider integration
Pricing models:
- Per seat (Slack, Linear) — price per user per month
- Usage-based (Stripe, Twilio) — price per action/volume
- Flat-rate tiers — starter / growth / enterprise
B2B vs B2C SaaS architecture: B2C can be single-tenant (each user is isolated naturally). B2B needs multi-tenancy — one account can have 50 users, all sharing company data, all isolated from other companies.
What to build from day one: Multi-tenant data model (tenant_id on every table), Row-Level Security, and a team invitation flow. Adding these retroactively to a single-tenant app is expensive.