Growth arrives before the platform is ready
The quarter you find product-market fit is the quarter the architecture stops coping. Scaling a platform while it is being sold is a different problem from building one.
SaaS
SaaS platforms, scaled while they sell.
Software development for SaaS companies: platform engineering, customer migrations, and inherited codebases made owned. Tarmac has taken a platform through 300% customer growth, doubled a compliance SaaS delivery rate, and moved a 120+ microservice platform between clouds with one hour of downtime.
The context
What makes SaaS engineering hard
The product is never off. Every change lands on customers who are already paying, which is what separates SaaS from building software once and handing it over.
Every customer is a migration
In SaaS, onboarding is data movement. Whether it is one enterprise account or thousands of sites at once, the cost of moving a customer in sets the ceiling on how fast you can grow.
You inherit more than you build
Acquisitions, pivots, and departed teams leave a platform nobody currently employed has read. Owning software you did not write is the normal case, not the exception.
The bill scales with the product
Multi-tenant infrastructure that was cheap at a hundred customers is a line item at ten thousand. Cost per tenant is a product decision that surfaces as an engineering one.
How Tarmac helps
One senior team across the product and the platform under it
Custom software development
Product engineering that ships, from a first release to a Fortune 25 footprint.
DevOps & cloud
Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and migrations that land without taking the product down.
Cloud optimization
Cost per tenant brought under control, without trading away reliability.
AI & applied ML
Production AI inside the product and inside how the team supports it.
Proof
Results in SaaS
20 min
down from two days, across 100+ inherited repositories
1 hour
of downtime moving a platform used by 700M monthly listeners
$500K+
cut from the annual cloud bill, with about $1M projected
300%
customer growth in the first 9 months
2×
faster delivery of quality software
Transformed
work-order operations, end to end
80%
faster website migrations, at thousands-of-sites scale
Questions, answered
SaaS development FAQ
Can you scale a platform that is already live and selling?
That is most of what we do. For Passare we built the web and mobile products behind 300% customer growth in nine months, with the platform under load the whole time. Scaling while shipping is the normal condition of a SaaS engagement, not a special case.
We inherited a codebase nobody here wrote. Can you take it on?
Yes, and we have done it at scale. For INaudio we took ownership of a platform of 120+ microservices across 100+ repositories that our team had never seen, moved it off its former owner’s cloud with one hour of downtime, and ran first-line support from the day of the cutover.
Can you speed up delivery without lowering quality?
For GovDocs we joined as a blended internal and external team and helped the compliance SaaS deliver quality software twice as fast. Velocity in SaaS comes from process and repository hygiene as much as from headcount, which is what the Tarmac 10 is built around.
How do you handle customer migrations at volume?
By automating them. For Pantheon we built a tool that moved thousands of customer websites onto the platform 80% faster, which turns onboarding from a services cost into a product capability.
Our cloud bill is growing faster than revenue. Can you help?
Yes. For INaudio we took more than $500,000 a year out of a two petabyte estate after taking ownership of it, with about $1M projected. None of it came from renegotiating a rate; it came from writing the infrastructure down accurately and auditing the bill against the inventory.
Growing faster than the platform can take?
Tell us where it is bending. We’ll bring a senior team that can scale it without taking the product down.