Building a SaaS product usually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a first version customers pay for, and a few hundred thousand more to reach a version mid-market buyers will sign, before you pay to run it. Nobody publishes a SaaS-only average, so the numbers here start from the closest public data: on Clutch's pricing data, updated 21 September 2026 and read on 10 November 2026, the typical reviewed software project is $10,000 to $49,999, the average is $132,480 over about 13 months, and agencies charge $25 to $149 an hour by country. At those rates, our example MVP of 1,200 hours costs $30,000 to $178,800, and the work to make it enterprise-ready adds $62,500 to $372,500. Hosting is the small line; payments, single sign-on and a SOC 2 audit are the lines that surprise a first budget.
What a SaaS product costs, stage by stage
A SaaS product is not one purchase. It is bought in three stages, and each has a different shape of cost.
| Stage | What it has to do | What it usually includes |
|---|---|---|
| MVP | Get the first customers to pay | Sign-up and login, one core workflow, tenant separation, Stripe subscriptions, an admin view, error tracking and backups |
| Version 1 | Win and keep mid-market accounts | Roles and permissions, onboarding and data import, integrations with the tools customers already run, audit logs, SSO, in-app reporting |
| Scale | Grow without a rewrite | Performance work, SCIM provisioning, SOC 2 controls, a data warehouse behind MRR and churn, and a team shipping every week |
The hours below are examples we chose to show the arithmetic. They are not benchmarks, and a real product can land well outside them. The rates are Clutch's hourly bands for custom software agencies.
| Example | Example hours | At $25 to $49 | At $50 to $99 | At $100 to $149 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MVP | 1,200 | $30,000 to $58,800 | $60,000 to $118,800 | $120,000 to $178,800 |
| From MVP to version 1 | 2,500 more | $62,500 to $122,500 | $125,000 to $247,500 | $250,000 to $372,500 |
| Scale: four engineers for a year | 7,680 (4 × 160 × 12) | $192,000 to $376,320 | $384,000 to $760,320 | $768,000 to $1,144,320 |
On Clutch, US agencies sit in the $50 to $99 band, Canadian and Australian agencies in the $100 to $149 band, and agencies in India, the Philippines, Ukraine and Mexico in the $25 to $49 band. Clutch shows no rate for the United Kingdom. A lower rate can still cost more if the job takes more hours, so compare quotes on scope, not rate. For hourly rates in more depth, see how much custom software costs.
Why SaaS costs more than an internal tool of the same size
Four things are cheap to build first and expensive to retrofit:
- Tenancy. Every query has to know which customer it serves. Added at 50 customers, it touches every table and every test.
- Billing. Plans, trials, upgrades, proration, failed-payment retries and invoices finance can use. Stripe does the processing; the rules are yours to build.
- Permissions and audit logs. The first enterprise security questionnaire asks who can see what and who changed what.
- Self-service. Internal users can be trained. Customers need sign-up, password recovery, onboarding and help without a call.
Each one is a few weeks in an MVP and a few months in a rewrite. If the product is an AI product, the evaluation and guardrail work adds to this; what an AI MVP costs covers that part.
Freelancers, an agency or an in-house team
Who builds it changes what you pay and what you manage.
| Approach | Cost basis | What you manage |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancers | Hourly or per milestone. We found no dated, published rate survey we would quote | Hiring, coordination, code review, architecture and continuity |
| Agency project | Hours times rate; Clutch's bands are $25 to $149 an hour | Scope decisions and acceptance; the agency runs the team |
| In-house team | About $194,000 a year per US developer, by our arithmetic below | Everything: hiring, management, architecture, retention |
| Embedded engineers | Gigabit: $3,000–$7,500 per engineer per month | Priorities and review; the engineers work in your repos and ceremonies |
The in-house figure comes from the US median wage for software developers, $135,980 in May 2025, and benefits at 30% of total compensation for private industry in June 2026. Dividing the wage by 0.70 gives about $194,000 a year, or $16,200 a month, before recruiting, equipment and management. Four developers are about $777,000 a year by the same arithmetic.
Freelancers can be the cheapest route to an MVP when one senior person owns the architecture and stays. The risk is continuity: the product outlives the contract, and the next developer inherits decisions nobody wrote down. An agency suits a defined first version with an end. An in-house team suits the stage where the product is the company and work never stops. Many SaaS companies mix them: an agency or embedded team for the MVP and version 1, then hiring as revenue arrives. Build vs buy vs embed walks through the decision.
The cost by line item
Design
Product design (flows, screens, a component library) is usually inside the build hours rather than a separate invoice, and we have not found a reliable published share to quote. Two cheap rules hold: design the core workflow with a pilot customer before it is built, and reuse an established component library rather than drawing every control. The marketing site is a separate, smaller job; a Website Build with us starts at $6,000 fixed on Webflow, Framer, WordPress or Wix Studio.
Build
The build is the stage table above: hours times rate, set mostly by the number of user types, workflows and integrations. Decisions cost hours too. A product owner who answers questions the same day saves more than a lower hourly rate would.
Infrastructure
Hosting a new SaaS product costs less than most budgets assume. These are list prices from each vendor's own page, read on 10 November 2026; they are examples of a common stack, not a recommendation for yours.
| Service | Plan | List price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel (front end and functions) | Pro | $20 per developer seat a month | $20 of included usage, 1 TB of data transfer, then from $0.15 per GB |
| Supabase (Postgres, auth, storage) | Pro | From $25 a month | 8 GB of database disk, 100,000 monthly active users, 250 GB of egress, $10 of compute credit that covers a Micro instance |
| Supabase | Team | From $599 a month | Everything in Pro plus SOC 2 and ISO 27001, SSO for the dashboard, 14-day backups, HIPAA as a paid add-on |
| Supabase compute | Add-on | Small $15, Medium $60, Large $110 a month | 2, 4 and 8 GB of memory |
| Stripe | Payments | 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card charge | Card processing |
| Stripe | Billing | 0.7% of billing volume | Subscriptions, invoices, retries |
| WorkOS | SSO | $125 per connection a month (1 to 15 connections) | SAML and OIDC sign-on for one customer |
| WorkOS | Directory Sync | $125 per connection a month | User provisioning and removal for one customer |
At launch, two developer seats on Vercel Pro ($40) and Supabase Pro ($25) come to $65 a month. Our published logistics MVP ran on $180 a month of infrastructure at launch (case study).
At version 1, with five developer seats ($100), Supabase Pro on Medium compute ($25 + $60, less the $10 credit, so $75) and three enterprise customers on SSO ($375), hosting is about $550 a month. Single sign-on is now the largest line, and it grows with every enterprise customer you sign.
Payments outgrow both. At $50,000 of monthly recurring revenue from 250 customers paying by card, Stripe processing is 2.9% of $50,000 ($1,450) plus 250 × 30¢ ($75), and Billing is 0.7% ($350): $1,875 a month, by our arithmetic on Stripe's list prices. Large customers paying by invoice and bank transfer lower that line.
Compliance
Compliance is the line most early budgets leave out, because nobody asks for it until the first large deal. SOC 2 is the usual request from US mid-market buyers. Auditors do not publish prices. Drata, which sells compliance software and so has an interest in the topic, gives these ranges on a page dated 25 March 2026:
| SOC 2 (Drata's ranges) | Small to midsize company | Large organization |
|---|---|---|
| Type 1 audit fee | $7,500 to $15,000 | $20,000 to $60,000 |
| Type 2 audit fee | $12,000 to $20,000 | $30,000 to $100,000+ |
| Total first year | From $25,000 for a small startup | Over $200,000 for a large enterprise |
The audit is the smaller part. The controls behind it are engineering: access reviews, logging, backups you have tested, change management and vendor plans that carry their own reports, such as the Supabase Team plan at $599 a month against Pro at $25. Products that handle health data need HIPAA safeguards and signed agreements with each vendor; Supabase lists HIPAA as a paid add-on on Team without a published price. If the product has AI features, enterprise buyers will also ask how they were tested; our AI Security Assessment is from $12,000 fixed.
Maintenance
After launch you pay for hosting and vendors (above), security updates, bug fixes and the changes customers ask for. You will see a yearly percentage of the build quoted for this. We have not found a reliable study behind that figure, so we do not repeat it. A SaaS product is never finished: budget at least one engineer's time for as long as it has customers, and ask every vendor to list running costs for your system in writing. If the product has AI features, models are updated and retired on the vendor's schedule; Managed AI Operations runs $3,000–$20,000 a month depending on the number of systems.
Three example budgets
These combine the lines above. All inputs are examples; change them to your own.
| Seed-stage MVP | Version 1 for mid-market | First year at scale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build | 1,200 hours at $50 to $99: $60,000 to $118,800 | 2,500 more hours at $50 to $99: $125,000 to $247,500 | Four embedded engineers at $3,000–$7,500: $144,000 to $360,000 |
| Hosting for a year | $65 × 12 = $780 | About $550 × 12 = $6,600 | Not modelled; usage-led |
| Compliance | None yet | SOC 2 Type 1 audit fee, $7,500 to $15,000 (Drata) | SOC 2 Type 2 audit fee, $12,000 to $20,000 (Drata), plus the controls work |
| Before payments fees | $60,780 to $119,580 | $139,100 to $269,100 | $156,000 to $380,000 plus hosting |
The same first year at scale with four in-house US developers is about $777,000 in salary and benefits alone, by the BLS arithmetic above. That gap is why many SaaS companies keep an embedded or agency team until revenue justifies hiring.
What Gigabit charges
We quote a SaaS build as a fixed price in writing after a one- to two-week scoping phase, because a single public number would mislead you. As a reference point, our published logistics SaaS MVP cost its client $48,000 and shipped in 11 weeks; what ten client projects cost shows the rest. The prices we publish for the work around a build:
- Prototype Production Review, $2,500 fixed, 5 business days: a senior review of an app built with Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor or Claude Code, credited in full to a build started within 60 days.
- Embedded AI Teams, $3,000–$7,500 per engineer per month: engineers in your team after launch, with a 2–4 week trial and no lock-in.
- AI Quick Win Sprint, $8,000 fixed over 3 weeks: one AI workflow added to an existing product.
- Website Build, from $6,000 fixed: the marketing site beside the product.
Start with the scope, not the rate. Write one page on the users, the workflow they pay for and the systems it must connect to, then ask every vendor for a fixed price on that page and a list of what it leaves out. If you want ours, MVP development and custom software development describe how the build runs.
