In recent years, the expectations for a seamless SaaS experience have escalated considerably. Developers, product owners, and CEOs alike now face heightened demands for streamlined signup processes that include alternative login methods and smooth transactional subscription flows. Gone are the days when a simple contact form, followed by a manual account setup and demo dispatch, sufficed. Today, your competitors are likely offering more autonomous solutions, enabling users to sign up independently and explore tools on their own.
In this article, we'll guide you through the essential features every SaaS application should have in 2024, ensuring you stay ahead in providing a user-friendly and efficient service that meets the modern standards of software delivery. Whether you're building from scratch or refining an existing product, these insights will help you align with the latest in SaaS development.
The signup and login interface is often the first point of interaction your users will have with your SaaS application. A seamless entry is essential; if users struggle to sign up or log in, it fundamentally undermines the utility of your software.
While a basic login process may have been sufficient in the past, expectations, especially in the B2B sector, have significantly evolved. Nowadays, a fully self-service signup and login system is indispensable. Users should be able to register and access your application independently, without hurdles.
Moreover, ensuring that your email notifications steer clear of spam folders is critical for maintaining open lines of communication. Offering multiple login options not only meets user expectations but also enhances the perceived reliability of your application. Choose authentication methods that align with your target audience: consumer-facing apps should incorporate widely recognized login options, while B2B apps should integrate methods that professionals are accustomed to in their daily workflows.
Additionally, users must have the ability to recover forgotten passwords effortlessly. Managing account settings should also be straightforward, particularly in applications like Slack, where users frequently invite and manage numerous team members.
For a deeper dive into crafting effective signup systems, be sure to check out our comprehensive article on mastering signup systems.
Modern authentication has evolved beyond the basic username and password setup. Today, more secure and user-friendly alternatives are available, with Single Sign-On (SSO) being a prime example. SSO allows users to maintain their logged-in status across multiple platforms, which is an advantageous feature your application should incorporate.
While usernames and passwords remain in use, enhancing them with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) has become essential. Additionally, offering at least two other login options can greatly benefit your users. In both personal and professional spheres, managing numerous accounts can be cumbersome. Providing a login method that users already employ daily—not only saves time but also enhances security. Professional users, in particular, who juggle multiple apps and oversee changing teams, will appreciate a familiar and efficient login option. Looking ahead, Passkeys represent the cutting edge of login technology, offering a completely passwordless experience and emerging as a necessary option.
Authentication and authorization are closely linked concepts. Modern authorization protocols, such as those using JSON Web Tokens (JWT), should be considered a standard for secure and efficient interaction between services. Relying on stateful authentication methods that continuously query your database can lead to scalability issues. Instead, using authentication tokens allows your service to communicate more effectively with other services online, optimizing both functionality and scalability.
Providing varied access levels to your users is crucial, especially in B2B applications where different roles unlock specific features and capabilities within your application. The typical method for managing these permissions is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). In RBAC, each role is associated with multiple privileges, which can then be used to restrict access to certain features and data.
Traditionally, developers might embed conditionals directly in the code to handle these permissions. However, a more dynamic and efficient approach combines RBAC with feature flags. This integration allows you to adjust roles and their associated privileges flexibly, without the need for frequent new releases. By using feature flags, you can seamlessly introduce or modify roles and permissions, enhancing the adaptability and scalability of your application's access control framework.
Your customers will primarily engage with your SaaS application either by making direct purchases through your website using their credit card or through a more structured contract and invoicing process. Both scenarios demand meticulous management of payment amounts and feature access.
In the dynamic early stages of a business, you'll often find the need to tweak your business model frequently. It might seem overwhelming, but having the flexibility to make these changes efficiently and cleanly is crucial. Without this capability, you're likely to encounter significant challenges.
It’s essential to maintain a transactional flow that allows customers to log in and subscribe to services on their own. Even if direct sales aren’t your primary revenue stream, offering this capability can significantly differentiate your service from competitors who lack such an option.
Furthermore, you should provide options for creating discounts or adding features for clients as needed. It’s also important for clients to easily access a clear overview of their subscription details—including periods, amounts, and included features—directly within the system.
To support these functionalities, you will need to integrate with a payment provider and develop the logic necessary for selecting, upgrading, and downgrading services. Additionally, writing front-end code to support these features is essential to deliver a complete and satisfying user experience.
Roles, subscription tiers, and market segments are just a few of the factors that determine which features your users can access. Traditionally, these elements are managed through hardcoded conditionals within the application. However, modern applications demand greater flexibility, allowing for changes without constant reliance on the technical team or the need for frequent releases.
The use of feature flags offers a transformative solution. By assigning criteria dynamically to these flags, you gain the flexibility to decide and adjust which features are available, significantly enhancing your development process. This method also supports more strategic product management practices, such as soft launches and rollbacks.
For instance, you can deploy a new feature into production without making it visible to all users—instead, activate it for a single test account to conduct thorough testing. Once confirmed stable and effective, the feature can be rolled out to the broader user base. If a bug is detected post-launch, the feature can be quickly disabled, allowing for fixes to be made without the pressure of a malfunctioning live feature.
Moreover, feature control enables precise targeting, such as exposing new features to specific markets, regions, or user segments for A/B testing. This capability not only enhances user experience but also provides valuable insights into feature reception and performance across different demographics.
Managing roles and their privileges, subscriptions, users, and authentication mechanisms, along with feature management, should ideally be handled with minimal need for frequent software releases. Ideally, these tasks would be governed through a user-friendly interface. This approach significantly reduces the workload for developers and empowers other team members—such as product owners, customer success personnel, marketing staff, and business development professionals—to take charge of these functions independently.
Having these capabilities accessible from a user interface not only streamlines operations but also allows various team roles to make adjustments and updates swiftly without relying on the technical team. This empowerment leads to quicker adaptations to market changes, enhanced responsiveness to customer needs, and better alignment of features with strategic business goals.
Allowing users to manage their own accounts is highly beneficial, but it's also essential to provide support when needed. To facilitate this, having a robust user management system in place is crucial. Such a system should offer a comprehensive overview of all accounts and their respective users, enabling your team to assist clients effectively, whether it's adding new users or editing existing ones.
While it might be tempting to deprioritize this feature in your development backlog, implementing it can significantly streamline operations. It saves time and reduces friction for your Customer Success team by enabling them to assist customers swiftly—whether helping them through a blockage, changing their role, or adjusting account settings. This feature not only enhances the user experience but also supports your team in providing excellent service efficiently.
When targeting enterprise customers, your SaaS solution must accommodate more complex and varied demands. These clients may require bespoke packages or unique role hierarchies and often need integration with their own Single Sign-On (SSO) systems. Initially, coding for a unique SSO or adding specific conditionals for a particular client might seem daunting, particularly before the deal is finalized. This can create friction and delay, as dedicating development resources becomes necessary only after the client's commitment.
However, having a robust feature control system and a flexible SSO implementation in place can significantly reduce this overhead. This setup allows you to approach enterprise clients confidently, knowing you can meet their specific needs without extensive internal development each time.
Additionally, if your feature control is seamlessly integrated with your user and subscription management systems, you can leverage parameters for targeted feature flags. This integration enables you to customize experiences for individual enterprise clients efficiently, using feature flags to deliver personalized functionalities without extensive coding or redevelopment for each client's unique requirements. This approach not only streamlines your development process but also enhances your ability to cater to the specialized needs of enterprise customers.
Taking data protection seriously from the outset is crucial, especially with laws like GDPR and CCPA in effect. Compliance with these regulations is non-negotiable, and both procedural and coding considerations, such as data retention and the right to deletion, must be addressed thoroughly.
If your clientele includes other businesses, there are additional legal obligations to consider. Compliance is not just a regulatory requirement—it's also a critical factor in your ability to sell your product. Businesses will hesitate to engage with a service that doesn't prioritize data protection, as it poses a risk to their own compliance and security standards.
When you begin targeting heavily regulated industries and enterprises, certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2 become important. While not mandatory, these certifications simplify the due diligence process and can significantly speed up business dealings with such clients. Obtaining these certifications involves both time and cost, but without them, accessing certain markets or clients could be challenging. Proper certification not only facilitates smoother transactions but also enhances your credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of potential enterprise clients.
The comprehensive requirements for SaaS applications can significantly strain the tech team, especially when these tasks seem routine compared to the excitement of core app innovation. Having developed over 50 SaaS apps with a core team of just five members, we've repeatedly felt this pressure. Initially, we aimed to handle these challenges with an "Agile" mindset, attempting to sidestep extensive coding tasks where possible. While this approach was effective for a time, the evolving landscape over the past decade has made it clear that clever shortcuts are no longer sufficient—we need to address these requirements thoroughly and correctly.
However, for a small team like ours, fully implementing all necessary features and compliances can take months. This highlights the need for efficient planning and prioritization to balance innovation with the essential groundwork, ensuring that our applications meet both current standards and user expectations effectively.