ByAhsan NadeemLead Full-Stack Engineer
Ask ten agencies what a SaaS MVP costs and you'll hear ten numbers between $15,000 and $250,000. They aren't lying to you. They're pricing ten different products, at ten different hourly rates, with ten different ideas of what "minimum" means.
So instead of another price range, this guide gives you the method we use when we scope a SaaS build: estimate the hours module by module, then multiply by a rate. Once you see where the hours go, you can check any quote you receive and decide what to cut.
The short answer: three typical MVP sizes
Almost every SaaS MVP we've scoped falls into one of three sizes. The cost columns below simply multiply the hours by three common blended rates: an offshore senior team (around $35/hour), a nearshore or mid-market agency ($60/hour) and a US or Western European agency ($150/hour).
MVP size | What it usually includes | Hours | At $35/h | At $60/h | At $150/h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Lean | One user type, sign-in, one core workflow, basic admin, card payments | 500–800 | $17.5k–$28k | $30k–$48k | $75k–$120k |
Standard B2B | Organisations and roles, two or three workflows, subscriptions, email, simple reporting, one or two integrations | 900–1,400 | $31.5k–$49k | $54k–$84k | $135k–$210k |
Complex | Real-time features, AI, several integrations, audit trails, stricter security or compliance needs | 1,500–2,500 | $52.5k–$87.5k | $90k–$150k | $225k–$375k |
These ranges are our planning numbers for a team that already knows its stack. They are not a quote, and your product may sit between two rows. What matters is the method, so let's open it up.
Where the hours go: a module-by-module estimate
A SaaS MVP is a handful of fairly predictable modules wrapped around one part that is entirely yours. Here's how we size each one:
Module | What's inside | Typical hours |
|---|---|---|
Discovery and scoping | User journeys, data model, technical plan, estimate | 40–80 |
UX and UI design | Key screens, a small design system, clickable prototype | 80–160 |
Authentication | Sign-up, sign-in, password reset; SSO or 2FA if needed | 40–100 |
Organisations, roles and permissions | Teams, invites, role-based access, tenant isolation | 60–140 |
Core workflow | The feature customers actually pay for | 200–600+ |
Billing and subscriptions | Plans, trials, checkout, invoices, webhooks | 40–100 |
Admin and internal tools | Support views, user management, feature flags | 40–100 |
Notifications and email | Transactional email, in-app notifications | 20–50 |
Reporting and dashboards | The few numbers your customers check weekly | 40–120 |
Each integration | CRM, accounting, calendar, telephony… | 30–120 |
Testing and QA | Automated tests plus manual passes | 15–20% of build |
Infrastructure and CI/CD | Environments, deployments, monitoring, backups | 30–60 |
Launch and handover | Production checks, documentation, knowledge transfer | 20–40 |
Add the rows that apply to you, and you have a defensible estimate. Notice how the generic modules add up to a lot of hours before you've built anything unique. That's why we push clients to buy, not build, wherever a good service exists.
What actually moves the price
1. Multi-tenancy and permissions
If several companies will share your product, every table, query, cache and background job has to know which tenant it's working for. Designing that in from day one costs a little more up front; bolting it on later costs a lot more. We wrote a separate guide on multi-tenant architecture on PostgreSQL if you want the details.
2. Integrations
A well-documented REST API with a sandbox can take a few days. A legacy system with patchy docs, rate limits and no test environment can take weeks. When you list integrations, mark which ones are essential for launch and which can wait.
3. Your core workflow's edge cases
"Users can book an appointment" sounds like a feature. In practice it's time zones, cancellations, double bookings, reminders and refunds. Edge cases are where estimates go wrong, so a good scoping session spends most of its time here.
4. Design ambition
A clean interface built on a component library is much cheaper than a fully custom visual identity with bespoke animations. For an MVP, clarity beats polish: you're testing whether people want the product, not whether they like its gradients.
The most expensive feature in an MVP is the one nobody uses. Cut it before it's built, not after.
Rates by region, and why the cheapest quote rarely is
Hourly rates vary more by region than by skill. Public 2025 rate surveys, such as Devico's Eastern Europe breakdown and Index.dev's country comparison, put the ranges roughly here:
Region | Typical senior rate (USD/hour) | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
United States | $100–$200+ | Easiest communication; highest cost |
Western Europe and UK | $80–$150 | Strong overlap with European clients |
Eastern Europe | $40–$70 | Mature outsourcing market, EU time zones |
Pakistan | $25–$50 | Strong English, 4–5 hours ahead of the UK |
India | $20–$45 | Huge market; quality varies widely between vendors |
A low rate only saves money if the team doesn't need twice the hours, a rewrite later or constant supervision. Judge a vendor on how they estimate, how they communicate and what their code looks like, then compare rates. (We're a Pakistan-based team, so we've written an honest guide to outsourcing software development to Pakistan, including the risks.)
How to cut cost without cutting corners
- Launch with one user type. Admins, managers and guests can come in version two.
- Buy the commodity parts. Use a payment provider for billing, a hosted service for email and an identity provider if you need enterprise SSO.
- Make the admin panel plain. Your support team needs it to work, not to look beautiful.
- Skip microservices. A well-structured single application is faster to build and cheaper to run until you have real scale.
- Fix the scope of phase one. Agree what "done" means before the build starts, and park new ideas in a backlog.
The costs that start after launch
Building the MVP is the first bill, not the last. Plan for:
- Hosting, database and storage, which is usually modest until you have real traffic.
- Third-party services: email, monitoring, error tracking, maps, AI APIs.
- Payment processing fees. Stripe's standard US card rate, for example, is 2.9% plus 30¢ per successful charge.
- Maintenance: security updates, dependency upgrades and bug fixes. A common planning rule is 15–20% of the original build cost per year.
A realistic timeline
For a standard B2B MVP with two or three engineers, a typical plan looks like this:
- Weeks 1–2: discovery, data model, designs for the key screens.
- Weeks 3–10: build in one- or two-week sprints, with a demo at the end of each.
- Weeks 11–12: testing, fixes, security checks, production set-up.
- Week 13 onwards: launch to early customers, measure, iterate.
If someone promises a complex SaaS in four weeks, ask exactly which rows of the table above they're leaving out.
Frequently asked questions
Can I build a SaaS MVP for $10,000?
Sometimes, if the product is narrow (one user type, one workflow) and you lean heavily on no-code tools or ready-made services. A custom-built B2B product with organisations, roles and billing almost always needs more.
How long does it take to build a SaaS MVP?
Most of the MVPs in the table above take 8 to 16 weeks with a small, experienced team. Discovery often saves more time than it costs, because it removes surprises from the build.
Should I choose a fixed price or pay by the hour?
Fixed price works when the scope is clear and stable; time and materials suits products that will change as you learn. Many teams mix the two. See our guide to fixed price vs time and materials for the trade-offs.
Does my MVP need to be multi-tenant?
If you're selling to companies rather than individuals, usually yes. Designing tenant isolation in from the start is far cheaper than adding it once customers' data is already mixed together.
Who owns the code?
You should. Make sure your contract assigns intellectual property to you on payment, and that the repository lives in your own account from day one.
If you'd like a scoped estimate for your own product, built with exactly this method, tell us what you're building. You can also read how we approach SaaS product development.
