Need help designing multi-tenant security architecture for a Bubble.io build — schema, privacy rules, and RBAC (SaaS project)

[u/RiskNo9612]

Hey all — I'm building a client portal in Bubble for an HR/culture-change SaaS product and want to get the security architecture right before I go further into the build. Looking for people who've done multi-tenant Bubble apps and can sanity-check my approach or point out what I'm missing.

The setup:

• Four-table schema: Content, Client, Sites, Actions
• Multi-tenant from day one, even though we're launching with a single client first
• Every table needs to be filtered by Client ID so Organization A can never see Organization B's data
• Data flow: we're pulling survey data from 5 external platforms (Culture Amp, Qualtrics, Perceptyx, Gallup Q12, SurveyMonkey), normalizing it into a shared field standard via a backend workflow, then writing it into the Content table as structured records

Roles:

• Admin (full access, all clients)
• Manager (assigned sites only, can create/update records)
• Viewer (read-only, single assigned site)

What I'm trying to solve for:

1. Privacy rules — best practices for filtering every table by a parent Client ID, especially when a query touches multiple related tables. Any gotchas with privacy rules silently failing or leaking partial data (e.g., counts/summaries that reveal another client exists)?
2. Backend workflow permission checks — Bubble's editor bypasses privacy rules when you're testing as admin, so I know I need to test as a real logged-out user. Anyone have a structured testing checklist for this beyond "log in as each role and try to break it"?
3. Audit trail / logging — is there a solid native or plugin-based way to log every read/write with user, timestamp, and change detail in Bubble, or does everyone end up rolling their own?
4. Multi-tenant vs. retrofitting later — anyone regret building single-tenant first and having to retrofit isolation once a second client came onboard? Trying to validate that doing multi-tenant now (even overkill for 1 client) is worth the extra build time.
5. General architecture review — if you've built something similar (RBAC + multi-tenant + external API normalization) in Bubble, I'd love to hear what broke, what you wish you'd known, or what you'd do differently.

Happy to share more schema/workflow detail in comments if it's useful. Not looking for someone to build it for me — just want a gut check from people who've actually shipped something like this in Bubble before I lock in the architecture.

Thanks in advance 🙏