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    Bespoke SoftwareSaaSAIMulti-tenantSupport & BillingLegacy Migration

    TheHub

    A complete support, contracts, billing and communications platform built from scratch to replace a stack of disconnected tools — multi-tenant SaaS with AI ticket triage, SLA automation, e-signed agreements, Stripe billing and real-time team chat in one product.

    Client

    Digital Hub (internal product, now sold as SaaS)

    Sector

    Managed IT Services, SaaS & Support Operations

    Duration

    Full platform build (2025–2026), ongoing development

    Key Result

    Four SaaS subscriptions replaced by one owned platform

    TheHub

    Overview

    TheHub is Digital Hub's own support platform — designed, built and run in-house, and now offered as a product to other service businesses. Most managed service providers pay for four things: a helpdesk, a contracts and billing tool, a live-chat product and a team messenger. Each holds a slice of the customer relationship, none of them talk to each other, and the combined bill runs to £50–£70 per user per month before anyone has answered a ticket. We built one platform that does all four, on one database, with one login and one audit trail. A customer raises a ticket, the SLA clock starts against the tier they actually pay for, the agent discusses it in an internal channel linked to that ticket, chargeable work is quoted and paid for inside the same thread, and the signed agreement covering the work sits on the same customer record. TheHub runs Digital Hub's live support desk today and is sold at £9–£19 per user per month.

    Inside the platform

    Ticket queue with live SLA status, priority and a super-admin pulse across every tenant — awaiting team, urgent open, unassigned and stale over three days.
    Ticket queue with live SLA status, priority and a super-admin pulse across every tenant — awaiting team, urgent open, unassigned and stale over three days.
    Contracts view: managed service agreements, retainers, SLA addendums and DPAs with versioning, renewal countdowns and e-signature status.
    Contracts view: managed service agreements, retainers, SLA addendums and DPAs with versioning, renewal countdowns and e-signature status.
    Reporting dashboard: ticket volume, first-reply time, resolution time and reopen rate, filterable by company and period.
    Reporting dashboard: ticket volume, first-reply time, resolution time and reopen rate, filterable by company and period.

    The Challenge

    Four tools, four bills, four sources of truth. Tickets in one system, contracts and invoices in another, live chat in a third, internal discussion in a fourth. Context was constantly re-typed between them, and nobody could answer "what is the full picture on this client?" without opening four tabs.

    SLAs that existed on paper only. Response targets were sold in agreements but not enforced anywhere in software. Nothing measured them, nothing warned before a breach, and nothing linked the tier a customer paid for to the way their tickets were actually handled.

    Customers drowning in email. Reminder logic in the old process fired daily. One client's owner received 57 emails in 30 days about tickets that needed nothing from him — an engagement problem masquerading as a notification setting.

    Chargeable work that never got charged. Out-of-scope jobs were done first and invoiced later, if at all. There was no mechanism to quote, take payment and only then start work. Agreements and NDAs were PDFs emailed around, signed however the customer preferred, then filed somewhere the support team could not see.

    Multi-tenancy done properly, or not at all. A platform serving both Digital Hub's own clients and paying SaaS customers has to isolate every tenant's data at the database level — and the same codebase powers an internal support portal and a public SaaS product, so internal clients must never see a paywall while SaaS tenants must never bypass one.

    Our Solution

    A single bespoke platform: React and TypeScript with TanStack Start on the front end, a Postgres cloud backend with row-level security on every table, and server functions handling payments, email, AI, scheduling and integrations.

    Support built around real SLAs. Tiered policies (Standard, Gold, Priority 24/7) with response and follow-up targets, versioned so a customer's acceptance is recorded against the exact terms they agreed to. A traffic-light indicator shows remaining time on every ticket, first replies tell the customer which SLA they are on, tickets awaiting a customer are nudged on a sensible cadence and auto-closed after a defined quiet period, and out-of-SLA work carries a published minimum chargeable rate rather than quiet goodwill.

    Chargeable work, paid before it starts. Super admins attach a cost to a ticket, which generates a Stripe payment link. The ticket enters a payment hold — flagged "Awaiting payment" and protected from auto-close — and the confirmed payment posts straight back into the thread. Work begins when the money has landed.

    AI where it saves time, not as a gimmick. AI triage, reply drafting, translation and reporting insight run on a metered credit system, so the cost of AI is visible and controlled rather than open-ended.

    Contracts, NDAs and signatures, in-platform. Onboarding runs a guided flow: company lookup, agreement review, a mandatory draw-or-upload signature, and an optional mutual NDA carrying an IP clause that assigns intellectual property to the client on full payment. Signed documents render to branded PDFs with the signature embedded, stored against the company and downloadable by staff and customer alike.

    Every channel in one inbox. Email, web chat, WhatsApp, SMS and social messages all resolve to tickets. Internal Slack-style channels and DMs sit alongside them with ticket linking, mentions, @everyone broadcast, desktop notifications and sound alerts.

    Billing that works both ways. Stripe-backed subscriptions with three tiers, monthly and yearly pricing, a 7-day trial and seat-based billing for public customers; SLA upgrades and per-ticket charges billed through the same integration for support clients. Paywall logic is scoped to the public product host, so Digital Hub's own clients never see a plan picker.

    Projects, meetings and a workspace. Project areas with files, links, credentials in a gated vault, whiteboards and tasks with checklists, attachments, approval feedback, mentions and reactions — plus Zoho Meeting integration with instant and scheduled meetings launched from tickets or chats, branded ICS invites and a full calendar view.

    Security enforced in the database. Multi-tenant isolation through row-level security on every public table, roles held in a dedicated table rather than on profiles, security-definer helpers to avoid recursive policies, restricted execution on privileged functions, and regular automated security scans with findings tracked and closed.

    Mobile and installable. A responsive interface with mobile bottom navigation and app drawer, installable as a PWA on iOS, Android and desktop, plus a Capacitor shell with push notifications for native distribution.

    The Results

    4 in one platform

    Tools replaced

    £9–£19 vs £50–£70

    Cost per user/month

    80

    Database tables

    216

    Security policies

    43 companies, 309 tickets

    Live workload

    1,809

    Messages handled

    23

    Branded email templates

    57 → a handful per month

    Email noise

    "We were paying four companies to hold four pieces of the same customer relationship. Now it is one platform, one bill, and the SLA we sell is the SLA the software enforces."

    Andie Ward

    Digital Hub, Digital Hub (internal product, now sold as SaaS)

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