B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS is software sold to businesses as a subscription service, hosted and operated by the vendor rather than installed on the customer's own servers. The customer pays per seat, per usage, or per tier and receives continuous updates, while the vendor keeps a single codebase serving many tenants, which is what makes the margins work. Selling to companies rather than consumers changes everything downstream: contracts are annual, buying committees include finance and security, procurement demands SOC 2 or ISO certification, and enterprise deals require SSO, audit logs, and role-based permissions before a pilot can convert. Salesforce established the model, and HubSpot, Slack, Datadog, and Figma are widely cited examples of it at scale. Distribution has split into two motions: top-down enterprise sales and product-led growth, where a free tier spreads through teams and sales arrives after usage does. AI has reshaped pricing pressure, since per-seat models sit awkwardly with products that replace work rather than assist it. The recurring pitfall is churn hidden by new sales — growth looks healthy while net revenue retention slips — and a thin wrapper over someone else's model rarely holds up as defensible product.