Notes from building BuildBase
Engineering decisions, teardowns, and the cost math behind them. Written by the people doing the work.
12 posts
What is usage-based billing, and what it does to your invoices
Usage-based billing charges for what a customer consumed rather than for access. The definition is easy. Defending the number on the invoice is the actual product.
Buy vs build for SaaS infrastructure
Buy-vs-build calculators price one module at a time. The real decision compounds across every module a SaaS needs, and the tipping point is not where most posts put it.
The maintenance cost AI code does not show you
AI can scaffold your auth and billing in a weekend. What it costs to maintain after is the number nobody prices - here is the year-two math.
Database-per-tenant vs shared schema: the decision is about migrations, not isolation
Shared schema, schema-per-tenant or database-per-tenant. Everyone frames it as isolation versus cost. The real fork is how many times you run every migration.
Entitlements are not feature flags, even when the same component renders both
A flag says the code is ready. An entitlement says this customer paid. Same boolean at the render site, different owner, lifecycle and failure mode.
Quotas are not credits: which one your plan actually needs
A quota resets on a fixed cycle and belongs to the plan. A credit is a balance the customer bought. Pick by who absorbs the spike.
The hidden revenue tax of billing platforms
Some billing platforms charge a percentage of revenue instead of a flat fee. Here is the crossover math showing when that costs more than a flat plan, and how to run it with your own numbers.
Self-host vs managed: the real cost comparison
What self-hosting BuildBase really costs: a custom-priced license plus compute, a managed database, monitoring and patch time, line by line against one flat managed bill.
The cost of building usage metering yourself
The real engineering cost of building usage metering in-house: build time, the maintenance tax that follows it, and the meter-drift bug nobody prices until it happens.
The cost of building auth yourself
The real line-item cost of building auth in-house at small-SaaS scale, in hours and dollars, not the enterprise figures everyone else quotes.
What database-per-tenant actually costs
The real cost of a database per tenant: infra bills, connection pooling, ops load, and the tenant count where it stops paying for itself.
The real monthly cost of Clerk plus Stripe plus Lago plus Knock
Four best-of-breed vendors, added up with the assumptions shown. The subscriptions are not the expensive part.