Onboarding flow
A guided first-use path built around the setup steps your product actually needs, with unnecessary friction removed.
Product frontend
SaaS frontends built for onboarding, billing, and feature gating
The frontend of a SaaS product is not one interface, it is a set of connected surfaces that each have to work correctly for a subscriber to keep paying.
A SaaS frontend gets judged by a different standard than a marketing site. A marketing site can be forgiven for a rough edge because it only has to convince someone to click a button. A product frontend has to hold up under repeated use by a paying customer, week after week, including on the days their subscription is about to renew or their trial is about to expire.
Three surfaces do most of the work here and most of the damage when they are wrong. Onboarding decides whether a new signup ever becomes an active user. Billing decides whether people trust the product enough to hand over a card and stay on it. Feature gating decides whether the product's pricing tiers actually mean anything or whether every plan quietly behaves like the top one.
Get onboarding wrong and you lose users before they ever see the value you built. Get billing wrong and you generate support tickets and chargebacks instead of revenue. Get feature gating wrong and you either frustrate paying customers with confusing restrictions or give away the exact thing you are supposed to be charging for.
We build these three surfaces as a coherent system, not as three separate projects bolted together, because a user experiences them as one continuous relationship with your product, not as isolated screens.
What it is
What a SaaS frontend actually has to do
It is the layer between your backend logic and the person paying to use it.
Onboarding needs to get a new user to a real moment of value as fast as honestly possible, without skipping steps that matter, like connecting an integration or configuring a setting the product depends on. Good onboarding is opinionated about order. It does not present every option at once and call that flexibility.
Billing surfaces need to show plan status, usage against limits, upcoming charges, and payment method clearly, and they need to make upgrading, downgrading, and canceling straightforward rather than something a user has to email support to accomplish. A billing page that hides the cancel option does not retain customers, it just generates resentment and disputes.
Feature gating needs to be enforced consistently across every surface of the product, not just shown as a locked icon on one screen while the feature is still reachable through another path. It also needs to communicate what a user would get by upgrading, at the exact moment they hit the limit, since that is the highest-intent moment to make that case.
Underneath all three, we treat the marketing site and the product as one visual and interaction language. A user who signs up from your marketing site and lands in an app that looks and behaves like a different product loses confidence immediately, even if nothing about the actual functionality is wrong.
Fit
Who this is for, and who it is not for
We would rather say no early than sell a program that cannot work.
Right fit
- You have a SaaS product, or are close to launching one, and the frontend is not matching the quality of the backend logic.
- Trial-to-paid conversion, plan upgrades, or churn are being hurt by confusing onboarding or billing screens.
- Your marketing site and your product feel like they were built by two different companies.
Not the right fit
- You have not yet defined your pricing tiers or plan structure. That needs to be settled before feature gating can be built correctly.
- You need a payments processor set up from scratch with no existing billing infrastructure. That is a backend engagement first.
- The product itself has no active users yet and the priority should be validating the core feature, not polishing the surrounding frontend.
Deliverables
What you get
The connected frontend surfaces that carry a SaaS product through its full subscriber lifecycle.
Billing and plan management
Clear plan status, usage tracking, upgrade and downgrade paths, and a straightforward cancellation flow.
Feature gating
Consistent enforcement of plan limits across the product, with clear, well-timed upgrade prompts at the point of restriction.
Shared design system
One visual and component system used across the marketing site and the product, so the two feel like a single company.
Usage and account surfaces
In-product screens showing usage against limits, account settings, and team management where the product needs them.
A frontend built to extend
Component patterns built to support new plans, new gated features, and new onboarding steps without a rebuild each time.
How we run it
How we approach it
We build the subscriber lifecycle in order, since each surface depends on the one before it.
Step 1: Map the subscriber lifecycle
We walk through signup, activation, upgrade, renewal, and cancellation as one connected sequence, not separate features.
Step 2: Design onboarding around real setup
We build the first-use flow around what your product actually requires to deliver value, not a generic welcome tour.
Step 3: Build billing and gating together
Plan limits, usage tracking, and billing screens get built against the same source of truth so they never disagree with each other.
Step 4: Unify with the marketing site
We bring the product frontend onto the same design system as the marketing site so the transition from visitor to subscriber feels continuous.
Why should the marketing site and the app share a design system?
Because a subscriber experiences them as one product. A visual mismatch between the site that sold them and the app they log into daily undermines trust, even when the underlying product works correctly.
Where this connects
Where this connects to other application frontends
SaaS frontends often share infrastructure with other frontend work we do.
The account and usage screens inside a SaaS product are frequently a form of dashboard built specifically to show a subscriber their own activity and limits.
If your SaaS product also needs a restricted view for external partners or resellers, that is handled as a client portal with its own separate access rules from the main subscriber experience.
If you are moving off a page builder or static marketing site while building this out, the transition is covered in migration from static which addresses how to carry SEO equity through the change.
Since the marketing site sits in front of the product, its indexation and crawlability still matter and fall under technical SEO which we treat as a separate but connected concern from the app frontend itself.
Questions
SaaS frontends questions we get asked
Get onboarding, billing, and gating working as one system
Tell us where subscribers are dropping off and we will show you what the frontend is doing about it.