BudgetingforaSaaSPlatform:WhatItActuallyCoststoBuildv1

Regardless of what your product actually does, v1 needs authentication (with password reset, session handling, and ideally social login), some form of multi-tenancy (isolating each customer's data correctly), and subscription billing — typically built on Stripe, handling plan tiers, upgrades/downgrades, failed payments, and cancellations. None of that is your differentiated product feature, but all of it has to work correctly before you can charge a single customer.

A real production example: a cloud infrastructure provisioning platform built on Next.js and Laravel with PostgreSQL handled exactly this combination — complex relational data, active-state polling, and full Stripe subscription billing — which is representative of the infrastructure layer most SaaS v1s need regardless of industry.

Once auth, billing, and multi-tenancy are handled, the remaining budget should go almost entirely to the one or two features that make your product worth paying for. Founders who spread budget evenly across ten features usually end up with a v1 where nothing is good enough to retain a paying customer — better to build three things well than ten things adequately.

PostgreSQL is a strong default database choice for most SaaS data models — it handles relational data, JSON fields, and full-text search well enough that you rarely need a second specialized database at the v1 stage.

Fixed-price SaaS v1 work starts from USD 500 for the smallest scoped builds and scales significantly with the number of user roles, billing complexity, and core features. Hourly billing runs USD 25–45/hr with a 10-hour minimum, which fits well for SaaS builds where the roadmap is still being shaped by early customer conversations. A complex build in this category typically takes 3–6 months to reach a genuinely sellable v1.