For SaaS companies
Reign for SaaS companies. SaaS customer community + docs.
SaaS companies use Intercom + Discourse + Notion for docs + a Slack community - 4 tools, no single login, no engagement metrics.
Reign + BuddyNext + Jetonomy for a unified customer community: forums, docs, tutorials and roadmap voting. All three of our plugins install free; bbPress is the alternative for teams already on it.
Customer forums, Q&A with accepted answers, and a public roadmap, free to install. You buy the Reign theme; BuddyNext, Jetonomy and Product Roadmap are ours and install free.
- BuddyNext community engine
- Jetonomy forums and q&a
- Product Roadmap roadmap
Three highlights for SaaS companies.
- 01
Tiered access: free public docs + paid customer-only forums.
- 02
A public roadmap via our Product Roadmap plugin, free to install; voting and statuses are its Pro upgrade.
- 03
Single SSO from your SaaS into the community.
What the site looks like on day one.
You launch with a customer community, public documentation, a forum for questions and a roadmap members can vote on. Support questions become indexed pages, docs sit alongside discussion, and the roadmap gives customers somewhere to put feature requests other than your inbox. For a SaaS the immediate win is deflection: the same question answered once, publicly, permanently.
What a member actually does.
A customer hits a problem, searches, and finds an answer written months ago for somebody else. If they do not find it they ask, and the answer becomes the next person's search result. Power users start answering before you do, which is the point at which the community begins paying for itself. The roadmap turns complaints into votes, which is a better conversation.
How this usually makes money.
The community is usually not a revenue line, it is a cost line that reduces another: fewer support tickets, better retention, and content that brings in trials. Where revenue appears it is a premium support tier or a certification course. The business case is normally deflection and organic traffic rather than subscriptions.
The mistake to avoid.
Making the community private. A members-only support forum moves tickets rather than deflecting them, because the answer helps one customer instead of every future one who searches. Public answers compound; private ones do not.
SaaS company-specific questions.
Why not Discourse?
Discourse is the better standalone forum. Jetonomy plus Reign wins when forums, docs and courses have to share one login and one design. If a pure forum is all you need, use Discourse.
Will this reduce support tickets?
Over time, and only if the answers are public and findable. A private community moves tickets rather than deflecting them. The compounding comes from search: the answer you write today is deflecting tickets in two years, which is not true of anything in your helpdesk.
Should docs and community be separate?
Same site, different sections. Docs are authoritative and written by you; the forum is where the edge cases live. Keeping them on one domain means one search box and one place customers learn to look, which is worth more than tidy separation.
How do I handle feature requests?
A public roadmap with voting, so requests become visible and comparable instead of arriving one at a time in support. It also lets you say no publicly and explain why, which customers accept far better than silence.
Who moderates the community?
Support, usually, as part of their existing work rather than a new role. Budget a few hours a week at the start. A community nobody from the company answers in reads as abandoned within a month.
How do we measure whether it works?
Ticket deflection and organic traffic to answer pages, not member count. A community with five hundred members and no searchable answers is doing nothing for the business.
Buy the theme. Add the plugins free.
BuddyNext, Jetonomy and Product Roadmap cost nothing to install, and each has its own Pro plan for later. Running the third-party stack instead? The BuddyPress Community Bundle kit is the packaged route. Or have the Wbcom team install either one for $699 flat.