Sahseh: a new platform, a new team, a clean migration

The client

Sahseh (sahseh.co) is the first Saudi application built specifically for verified discount codes and cashback. It has been live since 2019 and more than five million people have used it to avoid paying full price. The app carries offers for over a thousand merchants, among them Noon, Amazon, Trendyol, Shein, iHerb, Namshi and Styli, with cashback reaching 42% on some stores. It operates across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Egypt, runs bank-linked offer programmes with Saudi banks including Al Rajhi, SNB and Riyad Bank, and added a B2B employee-benefits offering on top of the consumer product.

That is a lot of surface area for a company whose engineering had grown organically. By the time we were engaged, the platform underneath was the constraint on everything the founders wanted to do next.

What we did

The audit

The engagement opened with an audit of the legacy application: what the code does, where the data lives, which parts are load-bearing, and what it would cost to keep each of them alive for another two years. The output was a split between what to carry forward and what to retire.

Architecture and standards

We defined the architecture for the next-generation platform and, just as importantly, wrote down the standards it had to meet. Sahseh had never had an internal definition of "good enough to ship". Precision matters in a product where a wrong coupon or a mis-attributed cashback claim costs real money and real trust, so the quality bar was set explicitly and enforced in review.

Building the team

A platform is only as durable as the people who maintain it. We ran the technical side of hiring for the entire product and engineering team: writing the briefs, screening, sitting in on interviews, and calibrating the founders on what a strong answer sounds like when you are not an engineer yourself. The team that shipped the new app is the team that was hired during this engagement.

The migration

Everything moved from the old platform to the new one. Partway through, a change of circumstances forced a cross-region cloud migration of the full production estate from the Middle East to Europe. It completed with no loss of user data.

Where it stands

The engagement continued after launch. Current work covers:

• Infrastructure operations for the production estate.
• A framework upgrade programme, so the new platform does not quietly become the next legacy platform.
• Compliance advisory for a card-linked offers programme with a global card network, including the PCI DSS certification path.