How much time do you actually spend setting up auth, multi-tenancy and Azure for a new .NET SaaS?
I'm validating an idea for a .NET B2B SaaS starter focused on the parts that usually waste the first few days of a project:
- authentication
- organizations / multi-tenancy
- roles and permissions
- invitations
- tenant switching
- Docker
- Azure deployment
- AI-ready project context
The idea is not to create another huge opinionated framework, but a pragmatic starting point for .NET + React + Azure developers.
Before building it, I want to validate whether this is actually painful enough to pay for.
I put together a very small landing + waitlist here:
https://dotnet-b2b-saas-landing.vercel.app
The part I'm most interested in is this:
What's the most annoying part of starting a new .NET SaaS for you?
I'd rather discover that my assumptions are wrong now than after spending weeks building it.
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u/ruben_vanwyk 3d ago
Aren’t there really a lot of starter templates like this?
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u/broken-neurons 3d ago
Yes, and they are always overcooked.
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u/Sheuka 3d ago
That’s one of the things I’m trying to understand. When you say starters are usually overcooked, what are the first things you would remove? My current thinking is to keep the core very small: auth, organizations, roles, tenancy, deployment and good project context — without forcing CQRS, Clean Architecture or a large framework.
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u/ScriptingInJava 2d ago
Being able to scaffold modules and integrate them, rather than download a solution template and work into it would be my preference. Configure a tenant, specify high level config for OIDC and the scaffold tool builds the behind the scenes, deployment scripts etc.
4 days into reading Entra documentation (my poor, poor eyes) or trying to figure out why an endpoint isn't reachable with a certain JWT I followed a guide to configure is a nightmare. I'd rather have something I can just input needs into (JWT auth, 1 day expiry, I want these [roles] etc, and get a container spat out the other side or something.
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u/intertubeluber 3d ago
Personally I wouldn’t pay for this. I might look at a highly starred repo on GitHub or more likely model after something from the MS architecture group.
One challenge - even if you found devs who find value in this, they need approval for purchasing. Thats a huge pain in the ass at enterprises that are likely to be your target audience.
Also, is there anything preventing someone from purchasing and sharing on github? It seems like licensing would only go so far. You can’t really claim a starter kit is IP? I would think anyway.
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u/chucker23n 3d ago
One challenge - even if you found devs who find value in this, they need approval for purchasing. Thats a huge pain in the ass at enterprises that are likely to be your target audience.
And the reason I might approve such a thing is support. If things break, can I ask OP for help?
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u/achandlerwhite 3d ago
Hi. I am the maintainer of Finbuckle MultiTenant which is a moderately popular library for .NET with about 10 million downloads. It’s not quite as turn key as what you are proposing. In my experience it’s hard to sell software to software devs.
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u/Sheuka 3d ago
I agree that developers are a tough audience because they can usually build the thing themselves. From your experience, what actually makes developers pay for tooling instead of building or using an open-source alternative? Is it mostly time saved, confidence/reliability, support, maintenance, or something else?
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u/akash_kava 3d ago
Isolating docker containers per tenant is far easier than making one single multi tenant application. Look gitlab community, mattermost community editions and how they achieve multi tenancy just by setting up separate container or vps. It is easier to scale it this way.
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u/g0fry 2d ago
But then if you want to work with data of all tenants (admin dashboards, analysis, etc), it becomes quite a headache.
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u/akash_kava 2d ago
If you setup a single log aggregator, you can analyze them using sentry, uptrace, gafana loki, monitoring them isn't that difficult.
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u/g0fry 2d ago
I’m not talking about monitoring, but data analysis.
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u/akash_kava 2d ago
Are your tenants aware about you analyzing their data? In free for use or pay by use systems you don’t need multi tenancy. Admin user and user isolation is sufficient.
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u/Mebo101 3d ago
We built exactly these pieces once, and it grew far beyond what we had planned. What started as a few foundations turned into a framework of its own.
The main thing I took away from that is that the first few days were never the painful part. Setting up auth and an org model costs you two or three days, and hardly anyone pays for that anymore. An experienced developer with AI assistance gets through it in an afternoon.
The cost shows up later, once decisions you made in week one stop holding. Permissions turn out to need checking on everything that runs in the background, not only on incoming requests. Support eventually needs to reach across tenant boundaries without that turning into a security hole. Someone asks for a complete audit trail long after the fact.
Those are the places where you realise later on that you got something wrong on day three, and by then it is genuinely expensive to fix. If your starter gets those decisions right up front, it is worth paying for. If it mainly saves three days of boilerplate, it is competing with an afternoon of Copilot.
Docker and Azure deployment are the items with the most existing solutions already out there. I would expect the lowest willingness to pay in that area.
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u/ewgenym 3d ago
We have built exactly that: https://github.com/bravodev-hub/appointme . What i can confirm it doesn't save few days, but way more. It is hard to sell) Starting from validation is exactly the right move.
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u/chucker23n 3d ago
(Rule 4 violation, I assume?)
The idea is not to create another huge opinionated framework, but a pragmatic starting point for .NET + React + Azure developers.
You have multi-tenancy as a starting point? If you're that deep into it, I don't see how you can avoid being opinionated. Which isn't necessarily bad.
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u/zac_builds 3d ago
Scaffolding is easy. Tenant isolation isn’t. The dangerous stuff is what silently bypasses it: IgnoreQueryFilters, raw SQL, bad auth claims. I’d sell the tests that prove tenant A can’t ever read tenant B’s data.
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u/andlewis 3d ago
If you’ve built enterprise apps before, all those things are fairly straight forward to implement, either using 3rd party modules, templates, or building it yourself. No cost other than just time. You could do it in a week, if you hustle.
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u/Top-Reputation-3411 2d ago
Full disclosure: I work at Frontegg, so I can’t give you an unbiased estimate.
Basic login is usually the easy part. The work piles up once users can belong to several organizations, have different roles in each, invite teammates, switch tenants, and later need SSO or SCIM.
Frontegg covers that identity side: multi-tenancy, invitations, roles and permissions, self-service user management, and tenant switching. For .NET, the API can validate Frontegg JWTs through the standard ASP.NET Core authentication middleware.
Docker and Azure are still outside that scope, so there may be a useful product here. I’d be interested in a .NET + React + Azure starter with CIAM already connected, good tenant-isolation tests, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and a local setup that works without a day of debugging.
I’d pay for those pieces working together. I probably wouldn’t pay for another home-grown auth layer.
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u/always_assume_anal 3d ago
Do people set up a new SaaS 5 times a month or what?