A first release of a SaaS costs $5,000 to $15,000 with us and takes 2 to 4 weeks. For that you get one main workflow, sign-up with roles, plans with card billing and an admin panel. Bigger B2B platforms take longer and are priced by the hour, at $39 to $55. A bookkeeping platform we built went live 10 weeks after kickoff, and an enterprise planning tool took six months. After launch, most teams keep building in weekly sprints of about $3,000 to $4,500, or move to a dedicated team at $6,000 to $9,000 per developer a month.
| Stage | What you get | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| First release (MVP) | One main workflow, sign-up and roles, plans and card billing, admin panel | $5,000-15,000 (minimum project $5,000) | 2-4 weeks |
| Larger first release | More roles, integrations, data imports, a marketing site | $39-55 an hour, quoted before work starts | 2 to 6 months in our projects |
| Weekly sprints after launch | New features and fixes every week | About $3,000-4,500 a week | Ongoing |
| Dedicated team | Developers who work only on your product | $6,000-9,000 per developer a month | Starts in 2-4 weeks |
The second row has the widest spread. SmartBuilding, a construction platform for site access and documents, took 2 months. IPOPBOOKS took 10 weeks. Ellipse, a planning tool built around Gantt charts and Kanban boards, took six months. What changed between them was how many roles, screens and outside systems each one had to handle on launch day.
For our MVP Price Index we read the pricing pages of 95 agencies. The 71 that show any price start at a median of $13,234 for an MVP. More than half don’t say what they charge themselves: 57% give no price of their own. The general “an MVP costs $X to $Y” ranges in cost guides have a midpoint of $77,500, while the agencies’ own price tags sit at $23,159.
Two more numbers from that study help with a SaaS budget. The 27 agencies that publish both a price and a timeline charge about $3,618 for a week of MVP work. And at the agencies that price AI work on its own line, the cheapest AI MVP costs a median 4.8 times their cheapest regular MVP. If your SaaS depends on AI, ask early whether the quote covers it.
A SaaS has several kinds of users, and money moves through it every month. That’s why it costs more than a simple app. These five parts push the price up.
A SaaS for companies needs accounts for the company and its staff, plus rules for who sees what. In IPOPBOOKS, bookkeepers see only their own clients, by name and ID number. Contact details stay visible to admins only. Each role means more screens and more tests.
Free trials, plans, upgrades and refunds touch more screens than founders expect. IPOPBOOKS launched with a 10-day free trial, three monthly plans and card billing. Before launch we ran a live card payment and a refund to be sure both worked.
Every outside system adds work and risk. Zuzan, a B2B meeting scheduler, needed Microsoft 365 before big companies would use it. IPOPBOOKS pulls in bank data, and its first bank data provider asked for a stack of security policies before it would sign. We moved the bank feeds to another provider so the launch didn’t wait on that paperwork.
AI costs money twice: once to build, then on every call. IPOPBOOKS remembers each approval a bookkeeper makes, so the next charge from the same merchant gets sorted from memory, with no AI call. Over time the platform pays for fewer AI calls per client.
If your SaaS holds money or personal data, plan time for access rules, logs and tests with real data. IPOPBOOKS moved its launch from June 1 to June 16 to test everything with live bank data first.
IPOPBOOKS does the books for small businesses in the US. The founder was starting the company from zero, and he needed his own platform for a plain reason: ready-made accounting software would have cost him more per client than he planned to charge.
We built all of it: the client portal, the workspace where bookkeepers post entries, the admin panel, the AI features and the marketing website. The team was a project lead, a backend developer, a frontend developer, a web developer, a designer and a QA engineer.
The pricing worked like this: the core scope had a fixed price, and every new idea got its own quote before anyone built it. The founder also saw working software early. The first demo came 3 weeks in, with the site, sign-up, bank connection, dashboard, bookkeeper inbox and admin panel.
The platform went public on June 16, 2026, 10 weeks after kickoff, on the client’s own AWS account. Monthly support followed, and a second phase was agreed in September. The full story is in the IPOPBOOKS case study.
Building isn’t always the right call. If an off-the-shelf tool does the job and its price per seat fits your margins, buy it. Build when the software is the product you sell, when ready-made tools cost more per customer than you charge, or when no tool handles the workflow your customers pay for.
Companies that need a tool, and not a company built around it, have a third option. We can pay for the build ourselves and keep the code and the rights to it, and you pay a subscription or by usage. The product can be white label, so your clients see your name and logo. You skip the upfront cost. In exchange you don’t own the product, and moving off it later takes work. If investors will ask who owns the code, own it from day one.
The build is one bill. A live SaaS also has monthly costs: servers and storage, AI calls if you use them, payment fees on every charge, and email and support tools. These grow with your customer count, so plan them per customer rather than as one flat number.
Then there’s new work. We usually keep building in weekly sprints, at about $3,000 to $4,500 a week for a small team. Once the product needs developers every month, a dedicated team costs $6,000 to $9,000 per developer a month.
A SaaS that sells from day one can pay back fast. QuizWithIt, a quiz platform for a science YouTuber, launched with a free tier and paid subscriptions. It got 5,000+ users in its first 3 months and paid for itself within 4 months.
Pick the one job your customers pay for and build it first. Take sign-up, payments and the admin panel from ready-made modules, so the weeks go into the part that makes your product different. Start on the web and add mobile apps when customers ask for them. Fix the price of the core scope and quote new ideas one by one, the way the IPOPBOOKS founder did.
Test the riskiest part before the full build. For Subflare, an AI lead scoring tool, we tested the AI in 2 weeks and only then built the MVP. If the risky part fails, you’ve spent two weeks, not a whole budget.
If you want a team that has shipped SaaS products like these, see our SaaS development services.
A first release with one main workflow, roles, billing and an admin panel costs $5,000 to $15,000 with us and takes 2 to 4 weeks. Larger platforms are priced at $39 to $55 an hour. Our bigger SaaS builds took between 2 and 6 months.
A focused first release takes 2 to 4 weeks. Platforms with several roles and integrations take longer: SmartBuilding took 2 months, IPOPBOOKS went live 10 weeks after kickoff, and Ellipse took six months.
Across the 71 agencies in our MVP Price Index that publish a price, an MVP starts at a median of $13,234. 57% of the 95 agencies give no price of their own, and the ranges in general cost guides have a midpoint of $77,500.
Servers, storage, AI calls, payment fees and support tools, and all of them grow with your customers. New features with us cost about $3,000 to $4,500 a week in sprints, or $6,000 to $9,000 per developer a month with a dedicated team.
Often it is, if a ready-made tool does the job and its price fits your margins. Build when the software is your product, or when ready-made tools cost more per customer than you plan to charge, as they did for IPOPBOOKS.
Yes. In our funded model we pay for the build and keep the code and the IP, and you pay a subscription or by usage, agreed case by case. You save the upfront cost, but you don’t own the product.
Describe your product in a few sentences. Our AI estimate turns it into a scope, a budget range and a timeline in about four minutes, before you talk to anyone.
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