Multi-Tenant — Help!

[mercer]

Hi all,

What is the best way in 2022 to build multi-tenanted apps in Bubble?

Other questions:

• What are the costs?
• What are the plans needed?

Thanks!

[josh24]

So I’m going to be really frustrating and say - it depends.

The reason it depends is because there’s a bunch of questions I’d run through first as they have a material impact on the best way to build it.

On one end of the scale you build a master app and put it on a production plan (~$500/m), and then you spin up sub-apps for each of the tenants (separate subscriptions) and they have completely standalone databases and you can add in a level of tenant specific customization that doesn’t muddy the waters for other tenants. This is the Rolls-Royce situation in terms of how it can work, but also in terms of costs. As you make changes to the master app, you can then push those down to the sub-apps. This is great for rolling out new features, breaking changes, etc as you can do this individually by each sub-app without needing a million rules and therefore manage changes better with each tenant.

On the complete opposite end you have one app (on say a pro plan at ~$120/m) and then you set up role types within the app and reference that to provide a level of tenant specific customisation and branding. This works though when there’s minimal variation between tenants (say not much more than branding) as the more conditions you throw in to handle each tenant’s requirements adds bloat to your app and it quickly become untenable.

Not an exhaustive list but some of the key things would be:

1. Does each tenant need a full white-labelled experience on their own domain, or does everyone go to your domain and then perhaps have a slightly customised and white-labelled or co-branded experience once they log in? Not impossible, but only hacks exist to deliver a full white-label experience without going down the sub-app route

2. How will your user authenticate. i.e. do they need SSO at the tenant level?

3. What considerations do you need to put in as far as data segregation? Depending on what you do and what your clients expect you might need totally independent databases (and therefore sub-apps) per tenant. Or perhaps they don’t care and you can just use the privacy settings to manage this.

…

I’ve worked with people to work through all these considerations in the past planning for B2B white-labelled & co-branded products on Bubble, so if it help you can book time with me on my website and I’ll run you through it on a zoom call.

Whether we speak or not, my advice is to ensure you really need to nail the approach with this sort of application before you start, otherwise you’ll end up creating yourself a mess and/or totally gold-plate it for no good reason.

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Josh @ Support Dept
Helping no-code founders get unstuck fast save hours, & ship faster with an expert on-demand