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Being an entrepreneur or startup founder, if you are looking to develop for SaaS development, the very first question you would have is – how much does it cost to develop a SaaS app?
If yes, you should spare some time from your busy schedule to read this blog. By reading this blog, you will learn:
- The complete cost estimate of developing a SaaS app
- Core factors that influence the cost of SaaS development
- Cost estimate of SaaS product based on development stages
As a leading SaaS development company, we know all the important aspects of building scalable, secure, and efficient applications. While having experience building SaaS apps for multiple industries, we are familiar with potential challenges, best practices, and variable timelines and costs.
So, we have written this comprehensive guide on SaaS application development costs. If you are planning for SaaS product development, this guide will help you to know the cost of SaaS application development.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer to Cost of SaaS App Development
In this section, you will learn about the SaaS software development costs based on its complexity. Here is a table that includes the tentative cost of SaaS app development.
| The Complexity of SaaS App Development | Timeline to Develop SaaS App | Cost of SaaS App Development |
|---|---|---|
| Micro SaaS | 3 – 6 months | $11,200 – $33,600 |
| Basic SaaS | 6 – 9 months | $33,600 – $50,400 |
| Medium SaaS | 10 – 12 months | $56,000 – $67,200 |
| Complex SaaS | 12 – 18 months | Starts from $67,000 |
As you have got the idea of cost depending on the complexity of SaaS apps, now let’s learn the key factors that impact SaaS software development. Let’s start with the first factor which is the scope and complexity of your SaaS solution development.
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5 Core Factors That Influence the Cost of SaaS App Development
Scope and Complexity of Your SaaS Product
Depending on the business logic and overall working of your SaaS product, the complete roadmap of your SaaS product gets decided. This roadmap includes the information, such as the purpose and outcome you expected from your SaaS application development.
As you add more features and functionalities with complex business logic, the number of resources and timeline of development increases. This directly impacts the SaaS development costs. Let’s take an example to understand this with an example.
The complexity of your SaaS product involves several sub-factors, such as a team of developers, the technology stack, architecture, integration with third-party services, and infrastructure to deploy your SaaS application.
For example, When you compare two SaaS applications like Trello and Salesforce, both these types of applications are different. Salesforce is a complex CRM platform having advanced features like sales pipeline management, marketing automation, and reporting feature. Whereas, Trello is a simple application that helps to manage the project and helps the whole project management process.Architecture Used to Build Your SaaS Application
An architecture of a SaaS application can be divided into multiple categories, such as multi-tenancy, single-tenancy, hybrid, microservices, and serverless architecture. The architecture of your application plays a critical role because it directly impacts the performance.
In addition, choosing an architecture helps you to learn about the scalability and customization of your SaaS application. Moreover, there are multiple attributes of architecture that influence the cost of SaaS application development. A few of them are as follows:
- Number of third-party integrations
- Scalability
- Security
- Legal compliance
As the complexity of your SaaS development increases, more effort and resources are required for engineers to develop your SaaS product and perform the integration. Next, let’s now learn about the third factor which is the integration of third-party services.
Third-party Services to Integrate into Your SaaS App
The application development team you hire will decide on your requirements whether to build a backend of your application from scratch or use third-party integration. Depending upon the integration complexity, the time required to integrate, third-party services access costs, and development time, all these sub-factors add up to your SaaS development costs.
No doubt using third-party API integration services speed up your SaaS application development as compared to development from scratch. Moreover, the types of APIs you choose to integrate also directly impact the development time of your SaaS application.
However, after the integration of APIs in your SaaS application, the developers need to perform unit testing and need to ensure your application works perfectly fine. Not only this, developers select reliable APIs, check vulnerabilities of your application, and manage the scalability issues of your SaaS application.
The Infrastructure of Your SaaS Application
The infrastructure you choose for your SaaS application heavily impacts the overall cost of your SaaS application development. As per your software requirements specifications, the hosting services and disaster recovery requirements are chosen.
When it comes to choosing hosting services, there are three options available in the market, shared, VPN, and dedicated hosting services. All these three options have different costs and depending on the specific requirements you choose anyone option.
If your SaaS application is highly scalable, then the resources and time required to design the infrastructure of your application. This way, it all adds up to the overall costs of your SaaS project development. Moreover, you might need data recovery and data backup services to avoid any disaster or outrage.
The Location of the Developers You Hire for Your SaaS Development
The hourly rate of developers varies from country to country. As the region and continents change, the charges of developers change significantly. For example, the hourly rate of developers from the USA varies from that of developers in Canada.
To provide your board idea, here is a table that includes the hourly rate of developers from different countries. The information is present in the Upwork, Freelancer, and SalaryExpert. Let’s check the hourly rate of different professionals in different countries.
| Hourly Rates for SaaS Application Development Professionals in Different Countries | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profile | United States | Canada | Western Europe | Eastern Europe | India | Southern Asia |
| Project Manager | $100-$200 | $90-$175 | $100-$175 | $50-$125 | $20-$50 | $20-$40 |
| Business Analyst | $100-$175 | $90-$160 | $100-$160 | $40-$100 | $15-$40 | $15-$30 |
| UI/UX Designer | $100-$175 | $90-$160 | $100-$160 | $40-$90 | $15-$30 | $15-$25 |
| Frontend Developer | $100-$175 | $90-$160 | $100-$160 | $30-$70 | $10-$30 | $10-$25 |
| Backend Developer | $100-$200 | $90-$175 | $100-$175 | $30-$70 | $10-$30 | $10-$25 |
| Full-stack Developer | $125-$250 | $115-$200 | $125-$200 | $40-$90 | $15-$40 | $15-$30 |
These are the key factors that directly impact the overall cost of your SaaS application development. Now, you have an idea which are the core cost factors that play an important role while developing the SaaS product. Check the next section to learn SaaS app development costs based on the different stages of the process of development.
6 Critical Stages of Developing a SaaS Application
Let’s learn the cost of SaaS app development cost as per the different stages of development. Check the following table to quickly get an idea of the tentative cost associated with each development stage for a basic SaaS application. For the table, we have the taken hourly rate of each professional at a minimum of $30 to a maximum of $45.
| Each Stage of Development | Timeline to Develop a SaaS App | Cost to Develop a Medium SaaS App |
|---|---|---|
| Idea Validation and Planning | 0.5 – 1 month | $2,400 – $7,200 |
| UI/UX Design | 1 – 1.5 months | $4,800 – $10,800 |
| Frontend Development | 3 – 4 months | $14,400 – $28,800 |
| Backend Development and Testing | 4 – 6 months | $19,200 – $43,200 |
| Total Development Cost | 7.5 – 12.5 months | $40,800 – $90,000 |
Idea Validation and Planning
Cost: $2,400 – $7,200
Timeline: 2 – 4 weeks
If you have an idea of a SaaS product and you are not sure whether it will work in the market or not. At this stage, you need to validate your idea with the help of a market search company. Or you can hire a reputed software development company to validate your idea.
On behalf of yours, the company you hire performs the research and surveys the market to know the potential of your idea, target audience, and expectation of end-users. The professionals involved to validate your idea and market research are business analysts, UX designers, senior developers, and market surveyors.
Designing of Your SaaS Application
Cost: $4,800 – $10,800
Timeline: 4 – 6 weeks
At this stage, the team of UI/UX design prepares the created wireframes and prototypes of your SaaS platform. The UI/UX design team prepares a simple and sophisticated navigation system for your application by keeping the user at the centric point. As per the architecture of your SaaS application, the UI/UX design of your application gets designed.
However, after designing the UI/UX of your SaaS application, the designer’s team performs testing to know whether the components are properly placed as per the requirements in the official document. Once the designs get ready, the frontend team starts the work.
Frontend Development for Your SaaS Project Idea
Cost: 14,400 – $28,800
Timeline: 12 – 18 weeks
In the frontend development stage, the designers dedicated the technology and frameworks to use for coding the front end of your SaaS application. After the design, the core part is the front end as it is the first place in which the users will interact.
A few of the primary tasks involved in front-end development are user interface design with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and building frontend functionality of your application. Make your SaaS application responsive so it looks and performs design-wise similarly on all the screen sizes, such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Backend Development of Your SaaS Project
Cost: $19,200 – $43,200
Timeline: 18 – 24 weeks
With the use of top web frameworks and programming languages, the developers start coding your SaaS application from scratch. Once the developers build the architecture and design of your SaaS platform, the coding stages start.
Upon the complexity of your SaaS platform backend, the developers create the features and functionalities of your web application. In addition, developers integrate the APIs like payment, authentication, security, social media, analytics and reporting. However, the backend developers create database design, server configuration, integration with the frontend, and fix the code issues.
Testing and Deployment
At this stage, the QA team performs the testing of your SaaS application. By performing different types of testing like unit, integration, performance, security, and UAT, the QA team ensures your SaaS application is working perfectly. If any issues or bugs are found on your SaaS application, they provide the application back to developers to fix the issues.
Until your SaaS application is completely secure and 100% bug-free, the testing phase goes on. After the successful results of testing, the developers deploy your SaaS application to the cloud or on-premises servers as per your requirements.
Maintenance and Support
Once your application is deployed on the web servers, you get maintenance and support from the SaaS application development you hire. For several months, you get free maintenance and support services from the developers. This way, if any bugs or issues are found on your application, the developers fix them and also update your application.
Monitoring your SaaS application helps you to update your SaaS application accordingly and make your application run in the market properly.
Ready to Develop Your SaaS Application?
Let’s talk. We are a top software development company in Canada, having a team of experienced developers, designers, testers, and business analysts.
Next, check out the FAQ section to resolve your doubts regarding the timeline and development of your SaaS application.
FAQ During SaaS Application Development Project
What are the core challenges of developing a SaaS application development?
- Designing an application that is able to handle a large number of users
- Ensuring to create of an application that can protect the user data from hacking
- Integration with multiple third-party services to build a properly functioning application
- Providing a smooth and easy-to-navigate user interface within your SaaS app
How long does it take to develop a SaaS product?
What are the hidden costs of developing a SaaS application?
- Ongoing maintenance cost
- Infrastructure cost
- Third-party services usage costs
Here is a list of key challenges to developing a SaaS application.
The tentative timeline to develop a SaaS application product from scratch ranges from 6 to 9 months. The cost of development depends on multiple factors, such as complexity, app development team, location of developers you hire, architecture, technology stack, and functionalities.
There are multiple hidden costs in SaaS application development. Here is the list.
Let’s Develop Your SaaS Application from Scratch
In this blog, you have learned about the cost of developing a SaaS product from scratch. Further, you have also gone through the core factors that influence the overall cost of development. In addition, you also get aware of the cost and timeline for each phase of the SaaS app development process.
If you have an idea for SaaS application development, let’s talk. We are a leading software development company in Canada, having worked with top brands like Canada’s Forest Trust and CamSafe. Book your consultation with us.
