Custom SaaS application development costs

Does anyone here have experience hiring a company to develop their SaaS project?

I have an idea to create a small application and build it up from there, but looking at different options as hiring freelancers for this type of work is a big no-no.

Budgeting-wise, can anything be done with $10K or the prices start way above that?

With such services, there obviously needs to be someone on board 24/7 who takes care of the maintenance and constant fixes, how does that work on a month-to-month basis because bringing someone on board on a monthly basis requires a constant cash flow (a separate fee from the development costs) which means that the app should start generating funds almost immediately.

One option is to hire people outside of the EU/US, etc... thinking about India but probably reputed development companies cost top-dollar there too.

If anyone has more experience in this and can shed some light on how to get a SaaS application done that doesn't cost an arm & leg then that would be much appreciated.

Thanks

I have done 4+ years of professional web development and app development with react, react native, nextjs, express, nuxtjs, nestjs, typescript, js, etc.

That really depends on the features of the SaaS, a simple sales site is not that hard to put up. Design wise it varies a lot also, you could use component libraries (material ui, ant design, chakra ui etc.), if you are planning on hiring an agency to create a brand, that alone would eat up half of your budget.

Working with companies overseas has bit many startups in the ass. I personally have worked with people and the main problem has been that the developers are taught not to ask questions and copying is more than encouraged. You have to be very clear with the scope of the features an functionalities. Otherwise they will go silent for months and deliver something totally different than you expected. As a non developer you also dont know if the quality is good or if its an unmaintainable mess.

As long there is no new features being developed the site will be up and running for a few years. After that you might have to hire someone to update the dependencies otherwise the site wont redeploy.

For content today most people use Strapi (self hosted free) or Contentful (very expensive), meaning that you dont need to create content management on your site. A third party site acts as the content management website and your site loads the content from there. This makes both development and maintenance cost lower in the long run

Its really hard to tell if your budget is enough but the same time its not a small change for a site. You would have to tell us more. The biggest problems of startups is that they have to pivot a few times before they land on something that works, just be ready for this, starting a new site

First, thanks for your valuable input.

BoKKeR said:

if you are planning on hiring an agency to create a brand, that alone would eat up half of your budget.

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Are there even any better alternatives in hiring a company?

Any half-decent developer has probably teamed up and branded their work via a legal entity so I think that's the most viable option. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of luck and you take coin-flips with your budget (by hiring different folks to do separate tasks/parts of your app)

I feel like holding companies accountable is also easier so I don't really see an option where I could do it differently without taking enormous risks.

BoKKeR said:

Working with companies overseas has bit many startups in the ass.

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This is 100% true. I've learned early on in my career to avoid certain countries when hiring for dev work. It'll be cheap, but you get what you pay for.

For your case I'd ask your personal network for a referral. $10k is a big risk to trust someone without really knowing if they can even get it done in the first place. If you're not a developer, or have a developer friend that can ask the right questions or guide you, you're gonna overpay 90% of the time. And if not, you might end up with an incompetent coder who got way in over their head, writes bad code, or just wastes your time.

You mentioned this is just an idea though. Ideas often don't work out, and in SaaS your idea is going to change many, many times. Note I didn't say it "might" change. It will. That means more development costs after the project's complete.

It's worth building an MVP to start and see if you can get interest and customers first. Use webflow or bubble to build something in a few weeks. Learn to use APIs or tools to hack it together. GPT4 would be very useful if you're inexperienced. It'll probably suck and be buggy, but it's best to know if you can get people using your idea before putting an investment in.

Deleted member 15724 said:

You mentioned this is just an idea though. Ideas often don't work out, and in SaaS your idea is going to change many, many times. Note I didn't say it "might" change. It will. That means more development costs after the project's complete.

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Thanks.

With this project, I am not trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather to knock off an existing tool and offer it for a better price so my vision is quite clear about the functionalities the app should have and I am not sure that my idea could change that much.

Have being there before and endup wasting my time and money. Below is what i learn paying freeancers to develop SAAS for me.
1. Make sure you capture the required features of the platform and write it down in a simple and easy way to understand.

2. If it requires alot of backend coding you should only hire in house developers or developers in your city that you can easily go to and discuss about your project or you learn coding and developed the backend yourself.

3. Only outsource the easy stuff like front end to online freelance.

NOTE: If your backend requires alot of coding tasks only use in house developers or developers from your city. Do not outsource it to any freelancer be it on bhw,freelancer,upwork or any other platform else you will loose your money and time and endup with an abandon project or a platform with a shitty code.

secure your money and time else you willl get rip off your hard earn money by incompetent and greedy developers with shiny portfolio.

Do you know how hard the SaaS features are to implement? That will be a big deciding factor for the price. You could find a technical cofounder or consultant to give you an estimate. Otherwise there is no way to give you a price estimate based on what you are asking since the hardest feature is unknown to us, the rest is standard cPanel functionality with user registrations, resetting, stats. Feel free to reach out if you need help with this

500-3k USD if you just to want to add subscription, saas feature, credit system, payment gateways etc.

Use freelancer sites, that allows you to pay with milestones and your money is safe.
Also choose a language that is common with many developers. PHP/Laravel

You didn't lay out any specifications so anyone tossing out numbers right now is clueless. As to whether or not $10K is enough, without knowing more details, can't say. SaaS implies there is going to be some kind of actual, functional software that needs to be made and depending on what that is $10K may be enough for the entire project or just enough to get started.

I do not recommend working with so-called "devs" who depend upon silly frameworks like laravel or symfony. These frameworks were created to allow incompetents to pretend they are developers, who produce bloated code that is full of bugs, who generally "code" by copy-pasting stuff from stack exchange into one of these frameworks, then selling it to the doofus who thought they were actually qualified programmers.

Lastly, if you have confidence in your idea then you should be willing to invest whatever it takes to get it going. Budgets make sense for day-to-day operations but when it comes to projects you'll need to be realistic, that the more complex it is the more it will cost and the longer it will take. A lot of people will promise they can get it done in a month or less, only to fail to deliver...unless it is something simple you can expect it to take several months or more to develop.

I have done what you want.

The most efficient way is to initially develop an mvp and ideally as a Micro SaaS, then scale up.

Feel free to pm me if you have any other questions.

Exxtra said:

You didn't lay out any specifications so anyone tossing out numbers right now is clueless. As to whether or not $10K is enough, without knowing more details, can't say. SaaS implies there is going to be some kind of actual, functional software that needs to be made and depending on what that is $10K may be enough for the entire project or just enough to get started.

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Exxtra said:

Lastly, if you have confidence in your idea then you should be willing to invest whatever it takes to get it going. Budgets make sense for day-to-day operations but when it comes to projects you'll need to be realistic, that the more complex it is the more it will cost and the longer it will take. A lot of people will promise they can get it done in a month or less, only to fail to deliver...unless it is something simple you can expect it to take several months or more to develop.

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Thankfully my idea or project is rather simple than more complex (I guess).

Interestingly I found reputed EU SaaS companies from Google and their prices seem to range from $50,000 to $120,000 which isn't that bad at all, considering that the doomers on Reddit claim you can't get anything done for less than $200k for an MVP alone.

INCC said:

With this project, I am not trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather to knock off an existing tool and offer it for a better price so my vision is quite clear about the functionalities the app should have and I am not sure that my idea could change that much.

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I've been dev project managing for a couple of years and all I can say, is that it's not that simply to specify requirements. One of the biggest issues here is that we take for granted things that we thought that should be done for obvious ways but then it was not so obvious for the development team.
From my experience, first of all you need a consultation call with a software architect. Think that this is like a house, so you need to draft the plan first. You need to decide which technologies are going to be used and all that. Don't let the first development team or freelance to choose for you, because many have pesky intentions (generally they try to tie you to them with pesky strategies).
If you can clearly define the scope and the structure, it won't matter much if you fail selecting the guy or company, you can always switch as long as everything it's done in a standardized way that anyone could catch up with ease. After this, you can start looking for someone that can done this with all the requirements and select the one that showcases you the biggest trust.

Emlicorm said:

I've been dev project managing for a couple of years and all I can say, is that it's not that simply to specify requirements. One of the biggest issues here is that we take for granted things that we thought that should be done for obvious ways but then it was not so obvious for the development team.
From my experience, first of all you need a consultation call with a software architect. Think that this is like a house, so you need to draft the plan first. You need to decide which technologies are going to be used and all that. Don't let the first development team or freelance to choose for you, because many have pesky intentions (generally they try to tie you to them with pesky strategies).
If you can clearly define the scope and the structure, it won't matter much if you fail selecting the guy or company, you can always switch as long as everything it's done in a standardized way that anyone could catch up with ease. After this, you can start looking for someone that can done this with all the requirements and select the one that showcases you the biggest trust.

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Very valid points.

I can give you an idea if you tell us your general requirements. User management, payment gateway integrations etc. One good rule of thumb is, it always costs twice as much and long than you expect it lol.

Seotify said:

One good rule of thumb is, it always costs twice as much and long than you expect it lol.

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My go to estimate calculation has always been double the initial costs expectations then add another full 30% to account for overhead, but this assumed in-house development. Works for me.

Have you explored the no-code option, depending on how simple your idea is? Take a look at Pegasus, which provides a platform to create simple SaaS tools, think of it like Elementor for SaaS

INCC said:

Thankfully my idea or project is rather simple than more complex (I guess).

Interestingly I found reputed EU SaaS companies from Google and their prices seem to range from $50,000 to $120,000 which isn't that bad at all, considering that the doomers on Reddit claim you can't get anything done for less than $200k for an MVP alone.

Click to expand...

Something that is simple probably shouldn't be getting quotes up to $120K with a $70K spread... although your idea may be simple the implementation may be complex. Just think: the idea of "ai" is quite simple - a computer that can understand and respond to input given in common language spoken by people. The implementation, i.e. what it takes to make it work, is quite complex and is not something you'll bang out in a month or two.

You may be thinking that you can use or re-use open source code or other existing code that is similar to what you want to make, but this is how "spaghetti code" is born. You'll end up with a clusterfuck code-base that may achieve your initial "mvp" goals, but due to the code being so convoluted adding features and fixing bugs becomes time-consuming and even cost-prohibitive.

As I said before in my other post, you didn't post any details (I get it, I wouldn't either) so I cannot say whether $200K is a reasonable estimate or not...and just the same, the people in this thread tossing out price quotes without any knowledge of the details are exposing themselves as incompetents. If you want to PM me privately, I can give you a better opinion and no, I am not going to steal your idea. I'm currently a mailer and content with that.

Tlacopan said:

Have you explored the no-code option, depending on how simple your idea is? Take a look at Pegasus, which provides a platform to create simple SaaS tools, think of it like Elementor for SaaS

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The business model of baiting people in with convenience so you can spy on them and then build-out the ideas that are profitable...so clever.

It's challenging to provide a specific cost estimate without knowing the details of your SaaS project. Custom SaaS development costs can range from tens of thousands of dollars for simpler applications to several million dollars for more complex, feature-rich systems. It's advisable to work with a software development consultant or firm to get a detailed project estimate based on your specific requirements and goals. They can help you define the scope, choose the right technologies, and provide a more accurate cost estimate.