What exactly does SaaS stand for, and should I pick this business model over traditional software?

The real reason consultants keep pushing SaaS is company valuation. Investors value traditional one-time licensing businesses at 2-3x annual profit, while SaaS companies with steady recurring revenue get valued at multiples of annual turnover. Just be prepared for your cash flow to run negative in the first 12 months.

Watch out for multi-tenant architecture. If you're spinning up a separate virtual server and dedicated database for every clinic, that's not SaaS, it's just legacy software hosted in the cloud. True SaaS runs on a single database and application cluster using logical data isolation. Otherwise, once you hit 50 customers, server maintenance costs will wipe out your margins.

When we were selling software to the healthcare space, we pitched SaaS the first year, asking for 900 TL a month, and nobody signed up. Then we switched to 10,800 TL billed annually upfront plus an onboarding and training package. Collecting upfront allowed us to raise 400,000 TL in cash to fund operations. In Turkey, SMBs are much more used to an annual invoice than monthly credit card charges.

With a subscription model, can the client just cancel any month they want? If they leave after two months, how do we recoup our customer acquisition costs?

If the prototype is done stop overthinking theoretical business models. Go visit your first 10 clinics in person and get them using it. Debating SaaS vs. licensing before seeing your churn rate or whether clinics will refer you is just a waste of time.

SaaS sounds great on paper, but nobody budgets for live support costs early on. When the system freezes on a Saturday evening a dentist won't submit a support ticket and wait 24 hours they'll call you right away. If you spend 4 hours on the phone every month supporting a clinic paying 1,500 TL your profit drops to zero instantly.

Great choice of niche no-shows and missed appointments are a massive headache for clinics. Don't get too caught up in investor buzzwords at the start. Begin with annual upfront contracts; once the product stabilizes and support tickets die down you can transition to a fully automated SaaS model.

pulling monthly credit card charges is tough in turkey tbh, card limits get hit, cards get replaced, etc. going with an annual contract and getting paid upfront or in 3 installments makes b2b cash flow way smoother.

I've been dealing with this for a long time. Finding a new customer is more expensive than keeping an existing one.

Splitting your budget without knowing where you're losing users is just throwing money in the dark. If I were you, I'd go this route.

I agree with this. Calculate how many months you can survive without revenue then halve that number.

Proven by experience.

This thread is archived. Everyone rushing into saas stands for gets stuck at the same point.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

We experienced almost the exact same thing last year. If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

Don't hesitate to ask; those who don't ask always pay more.

Following.

Saved.

My question might sound amateurish sorry about that. Don't enter any agreement without an exit plan.

Proven by experience.

Following... like calculate how many months you can survive without revenue, then halve that number.

If you have questions write them; Ill answer as best I can.

Let me speak from the other side; I'm on the supplier side. A small market isn't bad; working cheaply in a small market is.

Splitting your budget without knowing where you're losing users is just throwing money in the dark.

Same here.