SaaS development cost. Stage by stage.

A SaaS MVP that takes a paying customer costs $30,000-$80,000 from a senior-led agency. That covers 5-10 core features, Stripe Checkout for billing, basic auth (Clerk or Supabase Auth), single-tenant or shared-DB multi-tenancy, simple admin panel, and one or two integrations. Build in 10-16 weeks. The biggest mistake at MVP is over-engineering: skipping multi-region, SSO, SOC 2, and custom auth saves $50K-$150K and lets you ship to validate. See our SaaS MVP in 90 days playbook.

Three patterns with different costs. Shared database with tenant_id column on every row: $5K-$15K to set up, lowest infra cost, OK for <1K tenants. Schema-per-tenant (separate Postgres schema per customer): $30K-$80K, scales to 10K tenants, harder to query across. Database-per-tenant (separate database per customer): $80K-$250K, full isolation, required for HIPAA and some enterprise deals, expensive infra. Pick by compliance requirements first, then by query patterns. We default to shared-DB at MVP and migrate to schema-per-tenant when the first enterprise prospect demands it.

SOC 2 Type II readiness adds $40,000-$120,000 to the build (engineering work for audit logs, RBAC, encryption at rest, vulnerability scanning, incident response runbooks) plus $15,000-$40,000/year for the audit itself. Use Vanta or Drata for continuous compliance ($1K-$3K/mo) — they cut the audit prep time by 60-80%. Skip SOC 2 at MVP; required to unlock $50K+ ACV deals.

B2B SaaS typically costs 1.5-2.5x B2C SaaS at the same revenue stage. The drivers: SSO + SAML / OIDC ($20K-$60K), team accounts and role-based permissions ($25K-$60K), audit logs ($10K-$30K), custom contracts and procurement integration ($15K-$40K), SOC 2 readiness ($40K-$120K). B2C SaaS skips most of these but adds onboarding optimization, viral mechanics, and consumer-grade UX polish. The two markets have different cost shapes.

MVP that takes a paying customer: 10-16 weeks. Post-PMF SaaS with multi-tenancy and observability: 16-26 weeks. Scale-stage with SOC 2 and SSO: 24-40 weeks. Enterprise SaaS with multi-region and dedicated environments: 32-52 weeks. Each stage assumes 2-4 senior engineers full-time. Faster builds (4-8 week MVP) exist but skip the hard parts — billing, auth, observability — and have to be rebuilt before the first scale stage.

No-code tools (Bubble, Webflow + Memberstack, Glide) work for validation: $1K-$10K and 2-4 weeks to ship a clickable product. They break at scale: ~10K active users, complex business logic, custom integrations, real performance requirements all push you to custom code. Use no-code to validate the demand. Move to custom development the moment you have paying customers and a roadmap that requires features no-code cannot deliver. The migration cost from no-code to custom is roughly equal to building custom from scratch — so do not over-invest in the no-code build.