Multi-tenant SaaS is dead for mid-market (and why K8s namespaces are the future)
After selling to mid-market customers, I've become convinced that multi-tenant SaaS architecture is the wrong model for anything beyond PLG at low price points.
Enterprise procurement (and some mid-market) wants dedicated infrastructure. Full stop. Security questionnaires are brutal on shared tenancy Compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, FedRAMP) is infinitely easier with isolation
"You share infrastructure with our competitors?" kills deals
K8s namespaces give you 80% of single-tenant benefits Resource isolation, blast radius containment, independent scaling Customer-specific customization becomes trivial Noisy neighbor problems disappear
Sales-led growth with FDE (forward deployment engineers) commands premium pricing Implementation fees offset infrastructure costs Retention is higher when customers feel they have "their own thing"
IMHO, where multi-tenant still makes sense:
Product-led growth at <$10K ACV True horizontal SaaS with zero customization You're optimizing for scaling to millions of users, not hundreds of mid-market customers
Am I off base here? What am I missing? Would love to hear from folks running B2B SaaS at scale.
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