The bill for a first version, split by component instead of one blended day rate, with 2026 vendor prices and developer rates, so you can see where the money goes and where cheap quotes cut corners.
A first version of a B2B SaaS product costs $40,000 to $120,000 to build with a small senior team billing $60 to $90 an hour, and two to three times that at US agency rates of $120 to $250 an hour. Running it costs $150 to $600 a month before you have a single paying customer, then Stripe takes 3.6% to 4.1% of every subscription. Those are the headline numbers. A blended day rate hides where the money actually goes, so this post splits the bill the way we scope it: by component.
The short answer, line by line
These hours are our estimates from the platforms we've built, not a measured industry average. Your product's core will move the middle rows a long way. The plumbing rows barely move.
| Component | Hours | At $75 an hour |
|---|---|---|
| Auth, roles and multi-tenancy | 60 to 120 | $4,500 to $9,000 |
| Subscription billing | 80 to 160 | $6,000 to $12,000 |
| The product itself | 200 to 500 | $15,000 to $37,500 |
| Dashboards and reporting | 80 to 160 | $6,000 to $12,000 |
| Admin and support tooling | 60 to 120 | $4,500 to $9,000 |
| Integrations, API, webhooks | 40 to 120 | $3,000 to $9,000 |
| QA, deployment, handover | 60 to 120 | $4,500 to $9,000 |
| Total | 580 to 1,300 | $43,500 to $97,500 |
Swap in your own rate. At $150 an hour the same build is $87,000 to $195,000. At $45 an hour it's $26,000 to $58,500, and you should ask hard questions about who is doing the billing work.
Why a blended day rate hides the cost
Most quotes give you one number: 90 days at a day rate. That's fine for a website. It's misleading for SaaS, because roughly a third of the hours go on things your customers never see and you didn't ask for: tenancy, billing edge cases, admin tools, audit logs.
Skip those and the product still demos beautifully. Then the second customer signs up and your developer is writing a migration script at midnight because the data model assumed one company. We've been handed that rescue job more than once.
Line 1: Authentication, roles and multi-tenancy
The choice here is build or buy. Buying looks cheap at the start.
- Clerk's free tier covers 50,000 monthly retained users. Pro is $25 a month, Business $300. Each enterprise SSO connection is $75 a month, falling to $15 at volume.
- Auth0 is free to 25,000 monthly active users with one enterprise connection. B2B Essentials is $150 a month, B2B Professional $800.
- WorkOS charges $125 a month per SSO connection, dropping to $50 once you pass 100 connections.
Our position: build the login, roles and tenant isolation on the framework, and buy SSO only when the first enterprise customer asks for it. Laravel ships with sessions, password resets and two-factor patterns, so the 60 to 120 hours mostly go on tenant isolation and role-based access, which no vendor sells you anyway. The SSO bill starts the day a customer needs SAML, not before.
Line 2: Subscription billing, the line everyone underestimates
"We'll just use Stripe" is true and also not the point. Stripe handles the card. Your code has to handle plans, trials, upgrades mid-cycle, proration, failed payments, dunning emails, invoices, tax, refunds and the customer who downgrades on the last day of the month.
The Stripe fees themselves, from its pricing pages as of September 2026:
- Card processing: 2.9% plus 30 cents in the US, 1.5% plus 20p in the UK for domestic cards.
- Stripe Billing: 0.7% of subscription volume on pay-as-you-go.
- Stripe Tax: 0.5% of the transactions it calculates tax on.
- International cards add 1.5%, currency conversion adds 1%, and a dispute costs $15.
So a $100 subscription paid on a US card with Billing and Tax turned on costs you $4.40. That's the ongoing cost. The build cost is 80 to 160 hours, and it's the row where cheap quotes cut corners, because the corners only show up three months in when the first proration is wrong.
Our rule is one billing path at launch. Monthly plans, one currency, trials if you must. Annual plans, seats and usage-based pricing are each a week of work and none of them helps you find your first ten customers.
Line 3: The product itself
This is the widest row and the only one you control. A scheduling tool with three screens is 200 hours. A logistics platform with route planning is 500 hours before anyone mentions a mobile app.
Two things keep this row honest. First, a fixed scope agreed before the build starts. We end week one with a written scope and a fixed price, so the number in the table is a quote, not a range. Second, a first version that ships in 6 to 12 weeks. If the plan says six months, the scope is wrong, not the timeline.
Line 4: Dashboards and reporting
Customers log in for the screens that show them their own numbers. That's 80 to 160 hours of charts, filters, exports and the queries behind them, and it's where performance problems first appear, because a report that runs in 40 milliseconds with 100 rows runs in 40 seconds with a million.
Budget for the queries, not the charts. The charting library is a solved problem.
Line 5: Admin and support tooling
Impersonation (log in as a customer to see what they see), an audit log, feature flags and a way to refund or extend a trial without a developer. Nobody puts this in the pitch deck. Everybody needs it by month two.
Leave it out and every support ticket becomes a developer ticket. At $75 an hour, a support question that takes a developer 20 minutes costs $25. Twenty of those a week is $2,000 a month, which pays for the tooling in about two months. The 60 to 120 hours here are the cheapest hours in the build.
Line 6: Infrastructure and running cost
The monthly bill for a Laravel SaaS before it has revenue, using list prices from the vendors' pages in September 2026:
- Server management: Laravel Forge from $12 a month, plus the server itself, typically $24 to $96 a month at a cloud host.
- Managed database: an AWS RDS db.t4g.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB) is about $53 a month on demand. A database on the same box as the app is $0 and fine until it isn't.
- Error tracking: Sentry Team is $26 a month.
- Transactional email: Postmark Basic is $15 a month for 10,000 emails, then $1.80 per thousand.
- SMS and voice, if the product sends them: Twilio bills per message and per minute, budget $20 to $100 a month early on.
That's $150 to $300 a month on the lean setup and $400 to $600 with a managed database, staging environment and backups. It scales with customers, which is the good kind of bill. What it doesn't include is the developer keeping it patched, and that's the real running cost: plan for 15% to 20% of the build cost per year in maintenance and small changes.
Line 7: Compliance, only when a customer asks
The first enterprise prospect will ask for SOC 2. Do not build for it before then. A SOC 2 Type 1 for a 10 to 50 person company runs $28,000 to $58,000 all-in in 2026 and takes 14 to 22 weeks, according to firms that publish their engagement data. The compliance platforms that collect the evidence (Vanta, Drata) cost roughly $7,500 to $10,000 a year on top, and they're quote-only.
What you can do cheaply at build time is not paint yourself into a corner: audit logs, encrypted backups, role-based access, no shared admin passwords. All of that is in the hours above.
What developer rates look like in 2026
The hourly rate is the multiplier on every row, so here's the range agencies and contractors publish this year:
- US senior developers: $120 to $250 an hour.
- UK senior developers: $90 to $180.
- Eastern Europe: $45 to $90 for senior work.
- South Asia: $30 to $65 for senior developers, and as low as $15 for junior volume work.
Rate is not the whole story. A team that has shipped billing before does the billing row in 80 hours. A team learning proration on your project does it in 200 and gets it wrong once. Ask who has built a subscription system that's processing real money today, and ask to see it.
Three ways to cut the bill without cutting the product
- One billing path. Monthly, one currency, card only. Add annual plans when a customer asks to pay annually.
- No native mobile apps in version one. A responsive web app covers 90% of use cases and skips two app store reviews.
- Buy the boring edges. Email, error tracking, SSO, tax calculation. Build the thing customers pay for.
A worked example
An illustrative build, so you can see the arithmetic: a scheduling and invoicing tool for trades businesses. Core product 320 hours (jobs, calendar, quotes, invoices). Billing 100 hours. Auth and tenancy 80. Dashboards 100. Admin tooling 70. Integrations 60 (Stripe, Twilio for SMS reminders, a calendar sync). QA and launch 90. That's 820 hours.
At $75 an hour: $61,500, live in about eleven weeks with a team of three. Running cost in month one: about $220. The same scope at a US agency rate of $150 is $123,000. At $40 it's $32,800, and the billing row is where you'd want to look closely.
If you want this table filled in for your own product, see how we build SaaS platforms and book a 30-minute call. We'll come back with the component split and a fixed price, and if the right move is a smaller first version, our MVP process gets it live in 6 to 12 weeks.
Questions founders ask before they budget
How much does a SaaS MVP cost?
For a focused first version, $40,000 to $120,000 with a senior team at $60 to $90 an hour, based on 580 to 1,300 hours of work. The product's core is the swing factor. Auth, billing and admin tooling cost roughly the same on every build.
How long does it take to build a SaaS product?
A first version with one billing path and a fixed scope takes 6 to 12 weeks with a team of three. Longer plans usually mean the scope includes things the first ten customers won't use.
What does it cost to run a SaaS product each month?
Before revenue, $150 to $600 a month for hosting, a managed database, error tracking and email, using 2026 list prices. Then Stripe takes about 3.6% to 4.1% of each subscription once Billing and Tax are on. Plan for 15% to 20% of the build cost per year in maintenance.
Can I build a SaaS with no-code tools instead?
For validating demand, yes, and it's cheaper. For a product that charges money, handles several customers' data and needs to be sold to businesses, the billing, permissions and reporting edges are where no-code tools run out. Most teams that start there rebuild within a year.
Do I need SOC 2 before launch?
No. Build the habits it audits (audit logs, encrypted backups, role-based access) and start the audit when the first enterprise customer asks. A Type 1 report costs $28,000 to $58,000 all-in in 2026 and takes 14 to 22 weeks.
Who owns the code when an agency builds it?
You should own the repository, the cloud accounts and every credential from day one, and the contract should say so. If the agency hosts it in their accounts, you don't own a product, you rent one.
