What Is B2B SaaS?
B2B SaaS (Business-to-Business Software as a Service) is subscription software sold to companies — not consumers — typically featuring team accounts, role-based access, and usage-based or per-seat pricing.
B2B SaaS means your customers are businesses, not individuals. This changes the architecture, pricing model, and sales motion compared to consumer software.
What B2B requires technically that B2C doesn't:
- Multi-tenancy — company A's data is completely isolated from company B's
- Team management — one account, multiple users with different roles
- Role-based access control — admin can do everything; viewer can only read
- Audit logs — compliance teams want to know who changed what and when
- SSO / SAML — enterprise IT requires identity provider integration
B2B pricing models:
- Per seat (Slack, Linear) — $X per active user per month
- Usage-based (Twilio, Stripe) — pay per API call, message, or transaction
- Tiered flat rate — Starter / Growth / Enterprise with feature gates
Sales motion differences: B2C converts users with a free trial. B2B converts with a demo, a security review, and a contract. The deal cycle is longer, but deal size is larger and churn is lower.
Build this from day one: Tenant isolation (tenant_id on every table with RLS), team invitations, and role checks in API middleware. Retrofitting multi-tenancy into a single-tenant app is expensive — it touches every query in the codebase.