Insights · 5 min read
A straight look at SaaS development costs, the architecture decisions that matter, and why most SaaS projects stall long before the code does.
By GGP Editorial
Most founders we talk to think the hard part of SaaS development is writing the code. It isn't. The code is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what your software should not do, and then surviving the months of small decisions that come after launch.
We've built more than 300 products since 2018, and a good share of them are SaaS. Along the way we've watched the same three mistakes sink otherwise fine products. I'll walk through them, then give you real numbers.
Every SaaS build starts with the same question: how much will it cost. There's no single answer, but the range is narrower than most consultants admit.
| Scope | What you get | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-tenant MVP | Core feature, one customer, manual billing | $15k - $40k | 8 - 12 weeks |
| Multi-tenant product | Auth, billing, admin, onboarding | $40k - $120k | 3 - 6 months |
| Enterprise SaaS | SSO, audit logs, SLAs, integrations | $120k+ | 6 - 12 months |
These numbers come from a team of 40-plus engineers working from China, with clients in Brazil, South Africa, Singapore and the US. Other regions quote higher for the same scope. The gap isn't about quality; it's about the cost of living where the engineers sit.
The figure also moves with three things: how many third-party services you plug in, how strict the security rules are, and whether the product needs real-time features. A chat feature or a live dashboard is real engineering time. A settings page is not.
SaaS is a bet on architecture more than features. Two decisions matter most, and both get expensive to fix later.
First, tenant isolation. If you plan to sell to many businesses, decide now whether each customer gets their own database or shares one with a tenant column. Shared is cheaper to operate but harder to keep secure and slower to customize for a big client. Isolated is the reverse. We default to shared for early products and switch a customer to isolated when they pay enough to justify it.
Second, billing from day one. Stripe and similar tools make subscription billing look trivial, but the edge cases are where the time goes: prorating upgrades, failed card retries, VAT across borders, dunning emails, refunds. Build billing early, even if your first ten customers pay by hand. Retrofitting it later is painful.
One more thing that surprises founders: your admin panel is a product too. You'll use it every day for support, refunds and reading what users actually do. It deserves real design time, not a weekend hack.
Budget for running it as well. Hosting, backups, monitoring and the occasional dependency upgrade add up. Figure 10 to 15 percent of the build cost per year once you're live. It's the line item founders forget, and it's the one that keeps a product healthy.
Code is rarely the cause of death. The killers are less glamorous.
Scope creep is the big one. A founder adds "just one more" integration or dashboard before launch, and the launch slips a quarter. We once watched a booking SaaS stretch a simple product to nine months because of a permission system nobody had asked for.
The second killer is ignoring churn. SaaS lives or dies on retention, and most teams don't read the data until it's too late. If you instrument nothing else, track when users stop logging in and why. That one metric tells you more than a dozen dashboards.
The third is hand-off risk. Founders who use a string of freelancers often end up with a codebase nobody fully understands. A dedicated team that stays through launch and maintenance avoids this. That's why we run a dedicated group chat with a set overlap window for every project, in English or Portuguese, so the people who built it are the people who fix it.
The industry doesn't change much for us. We've built SaaS for finance, property, restaurants, trading and logistics. As long as it's legal, we'll build it. Our stack is boring on purpose: Java and Spring Boot on the backend, Vue or React on the front, MySQL and Redis for data, Nginx in front. Boring means hireable, maintainable and cheap to run.
We've shipped a multi-market brokerage trading system covering Hong Kong, US and A-share markets, a financial management system, and a self-ordering and POS system. The same patterns show up in all of them: clean tenant separation, solid billing, and an admin panel people don't hate.
If you're weighing a SaaS build, cut the feature list in half, pick a boring stack, and build the billing before the bells and whistles.
Tell us what you are building and where you are today. We typically reply within 24 hours.
