SaaS Development Cost (2026): MVP, v1 and Cost per Feature, with an Estimator

A SaaS MVP typically costs about $25,000-139,000 to build at Eastern Europe rates, or about $58,000-278,000 with a US onshore team. A v1 that enterprise customers will pay for, with SSO, usage billing and integrations, roughly doubles that, and a scaled platform with a public API and enterprise admin starts above $100,000 even offshore.

We are engineers who build web platforms and SaaS-style products, from a no-code ETL service to a Scrum and Kanban workspace and our own time tracking and CRM platform. The numbers below are planning ranges based on effort and published market rates, not a quote. Use them to size a budget, decide what belongs in the MVP and compare vendor proposals on the same terms. For one-off internal systems rather than products you sell, see our guide to custom software development cost.

Cost at a glance

Costs are hours multiplied by a rate band. We use about $35-80 per hour for Eastern Europe, the band in 2026 outsourcing rate surveys, and $80-160 per hour for US onshore teams, inside the $80-180+ range the same surveys give for North America. Calendar times assume a team of three for the MVP and larger teams for the later stages.

What drives the cost

1. The core workflow. This is the part customers pay for, and it varies the most. A product that collects data through forms and shows reports sits at the low end. Scheduling, real-time collaboration, heavy data processing or complex calculations push it to the top, and sometimes past it.

2. Multi-tenancy. Every SaaS product has to keep one customer’s data away from another’s. The simplest model is a shared database with a tenant ID on every row and checks enforced in one place. Separate schemas or databases per tenant add isolation and cost. Getting this right early is far cheaper than retrofitting it after launch.

3. Authentication and SSO. Email and social login are quick with a managed provider. Enterprise customers then ask for SAML or OIDC single sign-on with their own identity provider, plus SCIM so their IT team can add and remove users automatically. Each customer’s SSO setup also needs support time.

4. Billing model. Flat monthly plans on Stripe are straightforward: plans, trials, upgrades, invoices and webhooks that keep your database in sync. Per-seat pricing adds seat counting. Usage-based pricing adds metering, limits and reconciliation, and mistakes there go straight to customers’ invoices.

5. Admin and support tooling. Your team needs to see tenants, change plans, impersonate users safely to reproduce problems and fix data. Products launched without an admin panel end up with engineers running database queries for support.

6. Onboarding and analytics. The first ten minutes decide whether a trial converts. A guided setup, sample data and event tracking for activation are small items in hours and large ones in revenue. Customer-facing dashboards are a separate, bigger feature.

7. Integrations and API. B2B buyers expect your product to connect to what they already use. Each connector needs authentication, mapping, retries and monitoring, and a public API needs keys, rate limits, versioning and documentation.

MVP versus v1. The cheapest SaaS budgets come from a strict cut line. An MVP proves that one type of customer will pay for one workflow; it can live with flat pricing, email login and an admin panel only your team sees. A v1 is what you sell to larger accounts, and their procurement and IT teams add requirements: SSO, user provisioning, audit trails, data export, uptime commitments and security questionnaires. None of that is visible in a demo, yet it can take as many hours as the product itself. Deciding which of these your first ten customers truly need is the most effective way to control cost.

Use the estimator to price your own scope; the preselected modules match a typical MVP.

Cost by feature

The same modules as the estimator, priced at the Eastern Europe band. This is the closest answer to “SaaS platform development cost per feature” that holds up without your requirements.

The MVP rows add up to 724-1,740 hours, which we round to 720-1,740 in the table above. Adding all four v1 rows brings the total to 1,044-2,540 hours; real v1 projects also grow the core workflow and fix what early customers report, which is why the v1 range runs to 3,000.

Running costs after launch

Payments. Stripe’s US pricing page lists 2.9% + 30 cents per successful domestic card charge, and Stripe Billing on pay-as-you-go adds 0.7% of billing volume. On a $50 monthly plan that is $1.45 + $0.30 + $0.35, about $2.10 per charge or roughly 4.2%. At 400 customers on that plan ($20,000 in monthly recurring revenue), payment and billing fees come to about $840 a month. International cards, currency conversion and Stripe Tax add more, so model them if you sell abroad.

Authentication. Managed providers charge by active users and enterprise features. Auth0’s Free plan covers up to 25,000 monthly active users with one enterprise connection. Its B2B Essentials plan starts at $150 a month for 500 users with three enterprise SSO connections, and extra connections cost $100 a month each. Clerk’s Hobby plan includes 50,000 monthly retained users per app, Pro is $25 a month ($20 billed annually), extra enterprise SSO connections are $75 a month each and its enhanced B2B authentication add-on is $100 a month. Self-hosting identity avoids those fees but moves the security work to your team.

Hosting and services. Cloud costs depend on your stack and traffic; for an MVP they are usually smaller than payment and engineering costs, and they grow with data volume and the number of environments. Budget separately for transactional email, error monitoring, logging and backups.

Support and maintenance. Plan engineering time every month for bug fixes, dependency and security updates, Stripe and API changes, and the small features customers ask for. For a live product this is a standing team cost, not a one-time line.

Build, buy or combine

No-code builders are the fastest way to test whether people will pay. They are fine for a handful of customers. Limits appear with strict tenant isolation, complex permissions, heavy data processing and enterprise requirements, and moving off them later means a rebuild.

SaaS boilerplates and starter kits give you sign-up, Stripe checkout, a settings page and an admin shell. They can save several weeks when their stack matches what your team will maintain. They do not give you your tenancy rules, permissions model or core workflow, and an unfamiliar codebase costs time later if it does not fit.

Custom on a solid base is what most funded SaaS products end up with: managed auth and Stripe for commodity parts, custom code for tenancy, the core workflow, admin and integrations. That keeps the budget on what makes your product different.

How to get an accurate estimate

1. Write down the one workflow a customer must complete to get value, step by step.
2. Decide the pricing model (flat, per seat or usage-based) before design, because it shapes billing, limits and the admin panel.
3. Name your first customers’ requirements: SSO, data residency, audit logs or integrations they will not buy without.
4. Draw the MVP line. Mark each feature in the table above as MVP, v1 or later.
5. Share any constraints: stack your team knows, compliance, expected tenants and data volume.
6. Ask for an estimate per feature with assumptions, not a single number, so you can move items across the line.

From our work

We built a no-code ETL SaaS product where business users set up data pipelines in the browser without engineers. It runs on .NET 7 with a Vue.js interface, connects SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL plus CSV, JSON and XML files, runs recurring transfers on schedules and shows pipeline status in real time, with monitoring under one second. A REST API and WebSocket interfaces serve technical users. See the SaaS ETL platform case.

For a task management product, we built Scrum and Kanban boards, detailed task cards, time tracking and live updates for many users on the same boards. Node.js and MongoDB hold the core data, Redis caches hot reads, Elasticsearch handles search and the frontend uses React and Redux. See the task manager case.

For ProdUp, a product management and sync application for its clients’ WooCommerce stores, we refactored bulk imports to run as parallel tasks with retries and stored results, and added an admin dashboard that shows moderators duplicate SKUs and incomplete products. See the ProdUp case. We also run our own platform, OSKI Time & CRM, built in .NET, which joins a desktop time tracker with a web CRM for worklogs, leave, boards and pay, and which we now offer to other companies.

Where OSKI fits

OSKI is a .NET, React and AI engineering company with a team mostly in Ukraine. We build SaaS products from MVP to v1 through our custom software development service, set up hosting, CI/CD and monitoring through cloud and DevOps, and add AI features through AI development. If you already have a product and need more hands, we provide dedicated teams. Send your scope from the estimator above and you get a written estimate with the assumptions spelled out.