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

Lean MVP

$25,000 – $40,000

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

$40,000 – $80,000

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

$80,000 – $150,000

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 adds $20,000–$50,000 depending on feature scope and offline requirements.

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. We've shipped lean MVPs as low as $25,000.

Why do other agencies quote $5,000 for a SaaS?

They're either selling a SaaS template, hiding the scope, or offshoring to junior developers — and you'll feel it within three months. Production SaaS with multi-tenancy, billing, RBAC and proper auth genuinely starts around $25,000.

Do you handle ongoing maintenance and feature work?

Yes. Monthly retainers cover bug fixes, security patches, feature shipping and SRE on-call. Retainers typically range from $4,000 to $15,000 per month depending 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. UrbanFoods is a recent example: order cycle went from 4 hours to 18 minutes after migration.