How much does it cost to build a SaaS product?

The SaaS foundation

Every SaaS product needs the same four foundations before its first unique feature:

• Authentication. Email sign-in, Google sign-in, password reset, and, for business buyers, single sign-on later.
• Organizations and roles. A customer is a company, not a person. Users belong to a workspace, invite teammates, and have roles such as owner, admin, and member. Data must never leak between workspaces.
• Billing. Plans, trials, upgrades, downgrades, proration, invoices, tax, and failed-payment recovery, usually through Stripe Billing.
• Admin. A back office where your team can see accounts, help customers, extend trials, and spot problems.

Getting these right early is cheaper than retrofitting them. Workspace separation in particular is hard to add after customers have data in the system.

Why standard is the usual tier

A lean build covers one user type and one workflow. SaaS almost always needs at least two roles, team invites, and settings, which is standard by definition. If your product truly has one user per account, such as a tool for solo consultants, a lean build at $9,000 plus billing can work.

Large ($26,000) fits products with complex permissions, many integrations, heavy reporting, or regulated data from launch.

What to defer

These are worth having eventually and rarely worth having at launch:

• Single sign-on and directory sync, until a paying enterprise customer asks.
• Usage-based billing, until you know which usage metric customers accept.
• A public API, until customers ask to integrate.
• Custom reporting builders. Ship three useful fixed reports instead.
• Multi-language and multi-currency, until you sell outside your first market.
• Mobile apps, unless your users truly work away from a desk.

Each deferred item is a fixed-price addition later, through a care plan from $1,000 a month or a dedicated engineer at $8,500 a month.

Where AI fits

Many SaaS products now launch with one AI feature: drafting, summarizing, smart search, or classifying incoming data. One well-scoped feature adds $4,500. We build it with usage limits and cost tracking per workspace, so a single heavy customer cannot run up your bill. See what an AI feature costs for details.

Our SaaS work

We ran the admin and business-operations platform for Countable, a Canadian SaaS company, with a team of 20 engineers for more than four years, and built N3XUS Social, an AI-native social media management platform with Stripe billing. Both started from the foundation described above.

How you pay

Every fixed-price build is paid in four equal milestones, each tied to something you can see and use:

1. Plan signed. Scope, screens, and the delivery calendar are agreed in writing. The first payment starts design.
2. Design approved. You click through the full design on your phone before a line of production code is written.
3. Working build. The app runs on your devices with real data, and you test it against the agreed scope.
4. Launch. The app is live in the stores or on your domain, the code is in your repository, and handover is done.

If a milestone slips because of us, the next payment waits. You never pay ahead of the work.

Before your first call

You get a firmer number faster if you bring three things: who the first users are, the one job they must be able to do on day one, and any outside system the app has to talk to. Sketches, screenshots of apps you like, or a spreadsheet you want to replace all help. On the call we place your idea in the table above, name the extras it needs, and tell you what we would leave out. You leave with a written range the same day and a fixed quote within two business days.

Questions founders ask