Work / Multi-tenant logistics platform
SoftwareMulti-tenant logistics platform
Greenfield SaaS · Multi-tenant
Cargoline is a logistics-tech startup building software for freight forwarders and fleet operators.
Rope Digital built Cargoline, a logistics startup, a multi-tenant SaaS platform with usage-based billing in 14 weeks — migrating three live pilots with zero downtime and helping them reach $4M ARR in 18 months.
Client
Cargoline
Timeline
14 weeks initial
Category
Software
Result
0 → $4M ARR in 18mo
Cargoline platform
Greenfield SaaS · Multi-tenant
The client
About Cargoline
Cargoline was a 4-person logistics tech startup with a strong industry network and a working prototype built on spreadsheets, Zapier and a Retool admin. They had three pilot customers begging for a real product — and a six-month runway window to ship it.
The founders were clear: they didn't want a freelancer or a full agency rebrand. They wanted a senior product team that could ship a multi-tenant SaaS, charge their pilots, and graduate from prototype to revenue inside one quarter.
Industry
Software
Stage
Scale-up
Region
Global
Cargoline
Software · 0 → $4M ARR in 18mo
“Rope shipped what our last two agencies couldn't. We hit $1M ARR in our first quarter on the new platform — and never had a single billing dispute.”
The problem
What they came to us with.
01
Migrate a single-tenant prototype into a multi-tenant SaaS — without breaking the three live pilots.
02
Build a billing engine that handles per-shipment, per-seat, and flat-rate pricing in one model.
03
Give non-technical founders a way to run live customer demos from their own product every week.
Our approach
How we thought about it.
The strategic angle wasn't obvious from the brief. Here's how we broke down the problem before writing a line of code.
01 / Phased rewrite, not a big-bang
Phased rewrite, not a big-bang
We mirrored the prototype’s data model into a new multi-tenant Postgres schema with row-level security, then migrated pilots one-by-one over three weeks. Zero downtime. Zero data loss.
02 / Billing as a first-class module
Billing as a first-class module
Stripe + a custom usage-metering layer. Plans, add-ons, overages and credits modelled cleanly so finance stopped living in spreadsheets.
03 / Embedded weekly demos
Embedded weekly demos
Every Friday we shipped a working build to a live staging tenant. Founders ran customer calls against it the same afternoon. Feedback hit the backlog by Monday.
The deliverables
What was built.
01 / Module
React + Next.js operator portal with per-tenant theming (logo, palette, subdomain).
02 / Module
Node.js + Postgres backend with row-level security across 22 tenant tables.
03 / Module
Real-time fleet tracking via Mapbox + a WebSocket fan-out service.
04 / Module
Stripe-backed billing engine: usage metering, monthly invoicing, dunning.
Under the hood
What we used to build it.
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Stripe
- Mapbox
- AWS
- Docker
- Sentry
The results
Numbers that matter.
ARR in 18 months
Logistics operators
Uptime since launch
“Rope shipped what our last two agencies couldn't. We hit $1M ARR in our first quarter on the new platform — and never had a single billing dispute.”
— Daniel Reyes, Co-founder & CEO, Cargoline
What we learned
The honest takeaways.
Every project teaches us something. Here's what this one taught us.
Migrate live, not in a vacuum
Moving pilots one at a time over three weeks felt slower than a big-bang cutover — but it surfaced edge cases we'd never have caught in staging. Zero data loss, zero customer escalations.
Billing is a product, not a feature
We almost shipped Stripe as 'plug it in at the end.' Building it as a first-class module from week two saved months of refactoring once usage-based pricing landed.
Friday demos compounded trust
Founders didn't just see progress — they ran live customer calls against the staging tenant the same afternoon. Feedback hit the backlog by Monday. The roadmap was never wrong for more than a week.
Want results like these?