Next.js Developer
for SaaS

Next.js has become the dominant framework for SaaS applications because it solves the fundamental tension between marketing site performance and application complexity. Your landing pages need to rank in search engines... that means server-side rendering, optimized Core Web Vitals, and fast time-to-interactive. But your authenticated dashboard needs real-time updates, complex state management, and rich interactivity. Traditional architectures force you to choose: either a static marketing site with a separate SPA for the app, or a slow, monolithic SSR application. Next.js 14+ eliminates this tradeoff entirely. React Server Components let your dashboard pages render with the performance of static sites while maintaining full interactivity where needed. The App Router's nested layouts mean your navigation chrome loads once and persists across page transitions, creating that native-app feel SaaS users expect. Server Actions replace the boilerplate of REST endpoints for mutations, cutting your codebase by a third. And the middleware layer provides a single enforcement point for authentication, tenant resolution, and feature flags... critical for multi-tenant architectures. I've built SaaS platforms on Next.js serving 100,000+ monthly active users, and the framework's conventions prevent the architectural drift that plagues long-lived applications.

Every SaaS engagement starts with understanding your business model, not your feature list. The technical architecture should encode your pricing strategy: Which features gate on plan tiers? How do you handle trial conversions? What happens when a subscription lapses? I map these business rules into the application architecture before writing code, because retrofitting billing logic into an existing app is painful and error-prone. For multi-tenant SaaS, I implement tenant isolation at the database layer from day one... even if you're starting with a single customer. PostgreSQL's row-level security policies, enforced via Prisma middleware, make tenant data segregation automatic and audit-proof. The cost of adding this later is 10x the upfront investment. Authentication follows the same principle: whether you need simple email/password or complex SSO with SAML and SCIM provisioning, the abstraction layer is the same. I use Auth.js or Clerk depending on whether you need organization-level features, wiring the session into Next.js middleware so tenant context propagates automatically. My deployment strategy for SaaS prioritizes observability. Every Next.js API route logs structured events with tenant, user, and request IDs. Sentry captures errors with full context. PostHog tracks feature usage by plan tier. When something breaks at 2 AM, you need to know which customer is affected and why... without wading through logs.