How Much Does It Cost to Build a SaaS in 2026?

Lean MVP

8 – 12 weeks

Best for: Founders validating an idea with paying customers

Scope:

• Single core workflow shipped end-to-end
• Multi-tenant data model (row-level isolation)
• Stripe subscription billing with one plan
• Auth0 / Clerk authentication
• Hosted on Vercel / AWS with CI/CD
• Basic admin dashboard

Production SaaS

12 – 16 weeks

Best for: Funded startups going from beta to general availability

Scope:

• Full feature set across 2–3 user roles
• Multi-tenant with schema-per-tenant or row-level isolation
• Stripe / Razorpay billing with usage metering, dunning
• RBAC with custom roles
• Webhook outbox and external integrations
• Customer health and admin dashboards
• Monitoring, logging and on-call runbooks

Enterprise SaaS

16 – 24 weeks

Best for: Series A+ companies selling to mid-market and enterprise

Scope:

• SAML / OIDC SSO + SCIM provisioning
• Audit logs with immutability
• SOC 2 Type II readiness controls
• DB-per-tenant isolation where required
• Multi-region deployment with failover
• Advanced billing: usage-based, tiered, custom contracts
• Public API + webhook delivery
• Customer success tooling, in-app onboarding

Number of user roles

Each additional role with distinct permissions adds 1–2 weeks of design + RBAC work.

Multi-tenancy model

Row-level is cheapest. Schema-per-tenant adds 2–3 weeks. DB-per-tenant adds 4–6 weeks plus higher ops cost.

Billing complexity

Flat subscription is straightforward. Usage metering, proration, dunning and tax handling add 3–5 weeks.

Compliance scope

GDPR baseline is included. SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI-DSS each add 4–8 weeks of design, testing and documentation.

Integrations

Each non-trivial integration (CRM, ERP, accounting, custom IdP) adds 1–3 weeks.

Native mobile apps

A companion mobile app is effectively a second product — budget a separate engagement, not a line item.

What's the cheapest way to build a SaaS?

An MVP focused on one core workflow with hosted auth (Auth0 / Clerk), hosted billing (Stripe), hosted database (Supabase / Neon) and a Next.js front-end. Buying auth, billing and hosting off the shelf instead of building them is the single biggest lever on a first release — and none of them are hard to replace later if you outgrow them.

Why is one quote a fraction of another for the same brief?

Usually because they are quoting a different thing. A template with your logo on it, a single-tenant app that cannot take a second customer, or a scope that quietly excludes auth, billing and roles — all of which you discover in month three when you try to add them. Ask any cheap quote three questions: is it multi-tenant, who owns the code, and what happens when the first customer asks for SSO. Production SaaS with multi-tenancy, billing, RBAC and proper auth is simply a bigger piece of work than a template, and no quote makes that difference disappear.

Do you handle ongoing maintenance and feature work?

Yes. Monthly retainers cover bug fixes, security patches, feature shipping and on-call. Priced on team size and on-call requirements.

Can you migrate our existing SaaS?

Yes — we've done legacy-stack migrations (.NET, PHP, Ruby) to modern Next.js + Node.js + PostgreSQL stacks. A recent food-distribution B2B SaaS is one example: order cycle went from 4 hours to 18 minutes after migration.