A SaaS product with multi-tenancy and billing from day one
In SaaS, redoing the foundation is expensive, so we put multi-tenancy, pricing tiers and billing (Stripe or your payment gateway) in from the start. A SaaS MVP core starts at $14,900 and takes 8–10 weeks: enough to reach your first paying subscribers. A full platform with roles and a public API runs $45–90K, built in stages and by then funded by subscription revenue. We laid out the roadmap in our article on building a SaaS product.
Often the task sounds different: an internal system already works and customers are asking for access. In that case we package it into a product with pricing plans and data isolation instead of writing it from scratch. That the billing holds up under load was shown by our fintech MVP case: Stripe and PCI DSS, 10,000+ transactions in the first month of beta without a single failure, and the startup closed its seed round after the demo. We run on our own SaaS, too: MarchTracker, with a subscription and three platforms from one codebase. How big a platform for external customers can get is clear from the ERP/FSM platform in the US: the client's revenue tripled in 18 months.
The SaaS cost calculator gives a rough estimate by feature, and whether to build your own system or rent an existing one is a trade-off worth weighing before you start. If the goal is to test a hypothesis cheaply first, start with an MVP core from $9,900 without billing. If your paying users are inside the company rather than outside it, a web app or customer portal fits better, and systems that go deeper than a portal are covered by custom software development. Price ranges for every service are on our development pricing page.
