SaaS Development Cost: What a Real Build Actually Runs

SaaS development cost: three bands, and which one you are actually in

Across 2,000+ delivered projects, our SaaS builds settle into three bands. The band is set by how many user roles the product carries, how many outside systems it talks to, and whether anyone is going to audit it. The idea itself barely moves the number.

Tier 1: single-workflow MVP. $30,000 to $70,000. 10 to 16 weeks.

One primary user role plus an admin. Web only, responsive, no native app. Six to fourteen screens. Email and password auth, subscription billing through Stripe Checkout, one or two integrations against well-documented REST APIs. The pod is two full stack engineers, a product designer at half time, a QA engineer at half time, and a delivery lead. Shared-schema multi-tenancy, which holds fine to roughly 300 accounts.

What falls out of scope at this price, and you should hear a vendor say so out loud: native mobile apps, SSO and SAML, a bespoke design system (you get a component library skinned to your brand, not custom screens), audit logging, permission granularity past three roles, data migration from anything, a real admin back office, offline support, SOC 2 readiness, and load testing. This tier closes demos and gets a design partner live. It does not onboard a 400-seat enterprise.

Tier 2: production multi-tenant SaaS. $75,000 to $200,000. 5 to 8 months.

Three to six roles with a real permission matrix. Twenty five to sixty screens plus an admin console. Four to eight integrations. Usage or seat based billing with proration and dunning. One native or cross-platform mobile app is affordable here. Schema-per-tenant or row-level isolation, background job infrastructure, a reporting layer, CI/CD, staging and production environments, monitoring and alerting, and an automated test suite that means you can ship on a Friday. Pod is four to six engineers, a dedicated designer, a QA engineer, a DevOps engineer at part time, and a delivery lead. This is where most funded B2B products belong.

Tier 3: enterprise or regulated SaaS. $220,000 to $650,000. 9 to 16 months.

Eight or more roles, SSO and SCIM provisioning, immutable audit logs, per-tenant data residency, an outbound API with rate limits and docs, a webhook system, and SOC 2 Type II or HIPAA or both. Web plus native iOS plus native Android. Ten to twenty five integrations, several of them into systems built before REST existed. Two pods running in parallel with a solution architect over the top. If your buyer has a procurement department and a security questionnaire, this is your tier, and no amount of hoping makes it Tier 2.

What actually drives the number

Six things move the price. Every one of them has a dollar figure attached.

1. Integration count: $3,000 to $9,000 each, or $12,000 to $25,000 if it is old. A modern, documented, sandboxed API (Stripe, Slack, HubSpot, Google Calendar) costs $3,000 to $9,000 to build, test and error-handle properly. A legacy SOAP service, an on-prem ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), an EDI feed, or anything requiring a screen scraper costs $12,000 to $25,000, because half the budget goes into failure handling for a system that returns HTTP 200 on errors. Count your integrations before you read any quote. Six is $30,000 of the number.

2. Compliance: SOC 2 adds $18,000 to $35,000, HIPAA adds 12% to 18% of build. SOC 2 Type II readiness is engineering work: audit logging, access reviews, encryption at rest with key rotation, evidence collection, incident runbooks. That is $18,000 to $35,000 of build, and it sits on top of auditor and tooling fees you pay separately. HIPAA adds 12% to 18% across the whole build because PHI handling touches every table, every log line and every third party you sign a BAA with. GDPR done properly (deletion, export, consent, data mapping) is $6,000 to $14,000.

3. Multi-tenancy and scale: $8,000 to $45,000. Shared schema with a tenant_id column is nearly free and holds to a few hundred accounts. Schema-per-tenant or database-per-tenant with automated provisioning, per-tenant backups and migration tooling is $8,000 to $20,000 more. Architecting for 100,000 concurrent users instead of 500 (read replicas, caching, queue-backed writes, load testing) is another $15,000 to $45,000. Building tier 3 scale on a tier 1 budget is the single most common way founders burn $40,000 they did not have to spend yet.

4. Platforms: native mobile adds 60% to 80% of the web frontend cost, cross-platform adds 35% to 45%. If your web frontend is $40,000, native iOS plus Android is $24,000 to $32,000 more. React Native or Flutter is $14,000 to $18,000 more. Cross-platform is the right answer unless you need deep camera, Bluetooth or background location, where native pays for itself in the debugging you avoid.

5. Design depth: $5,000 to $60,000. A styled component library over shadcn or Material is $5,000 to $9,000. A custom design system with tokens, 40+ components, and screens designed rather than assembled is $16,000 to $32,000. Brand-led design with motion, illustration and a marketing site is $35,000 to $60,000. Design also silently sets the engineering bill: every bespoke component costs 1.5x to 3x its library equivalent to build and maintain.

6. Real-time, offline and data migration: $6,000 to $40,000. Live collaboration or presence (websockets, conflict resolution, reconnection) is $10,000 to $28,000. Offline-first with a local queue and sync is $12,000 to $30,000, and it is the requirement most often waved through in a kickoff call and discovered in month four. Data migration runs $6,000 to $40,000, and the driver is source quality: clean CSVs at the low end, a fifteen year old MySQL database with no foreign keys at the high end, where the cost is the reconciliation and the rehearsals rather than the script.

Worked example: field service SaaS for HVAC contractors

Multi-tenant web app for dispatchers, a React Native app for technicians, four integrations, migration off spreadsheets and a legacy scheduler. Six and a half months.

• Discovery, scope definition, technical architecture (3 weeks): $9,600
• UX flows, design system, 22 designed screens: $18,400
• Auth, multi-tenant foundation, roles and permissions, plan management: $16,800
• Scheduling engine: dispatch board, drag and drop, conflict and skill rules: $23,500
• Job records, customer records, attachments, notes, history: $12,000
• Technician mobile app, iOS and Android, offline job queue: $27,000
• Integrations: QuickBooks Online, Twilio SMS, Google Maps routing, Stripe billing (4 at ~$5,200): $20,800
• Back office reporting, exports, admin console: $9,400
• QA, automated test suite, two UAT cycles: $14,200
• DevOps, CI/CD, staging and production infrastructure, monitoring: $8,600
• Data migration, 11,000 job records plus 2,400 customers: $7,500
• Delivery management, roughly 10% of the lines above: $16,800

Build total: $184,600. We hold a further $18,460 as a 10% contingency, released only against signed change requests, so the client's board number is $203,060. That is the top of Tier 2, and the two line items that surprise people are the mobile app and the integrations. Together they are $47,800, roughly a quarter of the build, and both were one bullet each in the original brief.

The ongoing costs nobody quotes

Hosting. A Tier 2 SaaS at 2,000 monthly active users with modest file storage runs $350 to $1,100 a month on AWS or a managed platform in our deployments. At 20,000 active users with reporting workloads, $1,800 to $5,000 a month. Non-production environments add 25% to 40% on top.

Third party services. Published list prices you can check yourself: Stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful US card charge, Vercel Pro is $20 per seat per month, Supabase Pro is $25 per project per month. Add error tracking, email, SMS, analytics and a log platform and a typical Tier 2 product spends $400 to $2,500 a month before hosting. Stripe's cut is the one that matters at scale: on $1M of card volume that is about $29,000 a year in percentage fees plus 30 cents per charge, and none of it appears in a build quote.

Maintenance at 15% to 20% of build per year. On the $184,600 example that is $27,700 to $36,900 annually, and it is not optional. It covers dependency and framework upgrades, OS and library security patches, API version changes forced on you by vendors, bug fixes, and someone answering the pager. Skip two years of it and the third year costs more than the maintenance you skipped.

Year one changes: 25% to 40% of build. On $184,600, budget $46,000 to $74,000. This is the product meeting real customers rather than scope creep. Every SaaS we have shipped has rewritten some part of onboarding, reporting or permissions inside twelve months. Founders who budget only the build spend year one saying no to their own customers.

How to not get burned on price

The cheapest quote is a smaller scope wearing the same cover page. A $150,000 scope quoted at $38,000 means the vendor priced what they read, not what you meant, and the gap comes back as change requests or an abandoned repo. Our rescue work is consistent on this: taking over a stalled build costs 40% to 70% of a clean rebuild on top of everything already spent, because you inherit a schema and an auth model and you have to read all of it before you can safely touch any of it. Roughly one rescue in three, we keep the requirements and bin the code.

Price change requests off the blended rate. Get the blended hourly rate written into the contract. If the build was priced at $60 an hour blended, a change request at $140 an hour is a penalty. Anything under 8 hours should come back quoted inside two business days and fold into the current sprint. Anything over 40 hours is a small project and deserves its own scope document and its own price.

Terms that protect the number: fixed scope tied to a signed scope document with named deliverables and a written change control clause. IP assigns to you on payment of each milestone, not on final payment. Source code lives in your GitHub or GitLab organisation from the first commit, with the vendor added as a collaborator. Cloud, Stripe and third party accounts in your company name with the vendor invited. A 60 day defect warranty after launch. Milestones paid against demoable output, not calendar dates. Never more than 30% up front.

How to brief a vendor so the quotes come back comparable

Two vendors quoting $60,000 and $190,000 for "the same thing" almost always received different information. Fix that by sending every vendor an identical one page brief covering: user roles and how many of each; a rough screen count; every integration named by exact system and edition (QuickBooks Online, not "accounting"); what data migrates, from where, in what format, how many records; peak concurrent users and uptime target; compliance obligations; platforms; what already exists (brand, designs, a database); and your budget band plus the date something must be live. Giving the band is not weakness, it lets a good vendor tell you what fits inside it.

Then require the same three things from each quote: a line-item estimate per module in hours with the blended rate shown, an explicit list of exclusions, and an assumptions list. A single number is not something you can compare against anything. Ask each vendor which assumption, if wrong, moves the price most, and by how much. The one who answers that question precisely is the one who has built this before.