Custom SaaS development cost: prices by phase

What custom SaaS development costs depends on the phase. At Nimboo, product design starts at €3,500, an MVP in production at €36,000 with the design included, and v1 is quoted once the MVP is done. From one vendor to the next, the figures swing wildly, because two quotes for the same amount rarely include the same line items.

That last sentence is the whole article. If you’ve asked for three quotes and you’re comparing the totals, you’re comparing different things.

The short answer, by phase

Nobody builds a SaaS in one go. It gets built in phases, and each phase is quoted when the previous one wraps up:

Phase	Price	What comes out of it
Product design	From €3,500	Data model, architecture, fixed scope, clickable prototype and a firm quote for the next phase
MVP in production	From €36,000, design included	Two flows end to end and two roles, working with real users. No billing yet
Product v1	Quoted once the MVP is done	Subscriptions and billing, full modules, reports and multiple languages
Ongoing evolution	€390 – €1,600/month	The phase that never ends

For comparison, in the Spanish market one published price guide puts mid-sized custom software at €15,000 to €50,000, and a complex multi-tenant platform at €50,000 to €150,000 or more (Efiprox, in Spanish). Figures quoted as “MVP” by different vendors span an even wider range.

Most of that spread comes from what each vendor calls an “MVP”.

Why two quotes for the same project are €15,000 apart

This is the real problem with comparing quotes.

Three quotes arrive with the same one-page description (“multi-tenant management platform with subscriptions”). One says €12,000, another €25,000, another €45,000. The natural reaction is to assume the €45,000 vendor has a fatter margin. It almost never is.

The gap lies in what each vendor understood had to be built. And since the scope document is one page long, all three can be right at the same time.

Here’s one sentence read three ways. “With subscriptions” can mean:

• A Stripe payment link and a check on whether the customer has paid. Two days.
• Plans, mid-month plan changes with proration, failed payments with retries, a trial period, cancellation, downloadable invoices and reconciliation against the payment provider. Three or four weeks.
• All of the above plus invoicing that meets local tax rules. In Spain, for instance, invoices must be numbered consecutively within each series (Royal Decree 1619/2012, in Spanish). Add another long week, and a conversation with the client’s accountant.

All three readings are defensible. Only one of them lets you actually bill the month your first big customer signs up, and you can’t tell which one each vendor quoted because the quote doesn’t say.

Which gives you the first practical rule: a quote without a list of what it excludes is just a number to start the conversation.

What usually isn’t included

The price guides reviewed for this article, all of them ranking in Spanish, give ranges and list “factors that affect the price”. None of them lists what gets left out.

One pattern ties most of it together: what you don’t see in a demo is what doesn’t get quoted.

The admin panel

Clients assume that managing their own product comes included. Onboarding an organization, inviting users, changing a role, fixing a record someone entered wrong, finding out why someone can’t sign in, resending an invoice. None of that shows up in the demo, because the demo is run by the person who built it.

A proper admin panel takes 30 to 50 hours of work. Without one, every support issue from your customers ends up as a database query, and you pay for that anyway: in the vendor’s support hours, month after month.

Deployment and observability

Once the product is in the hands of people who pay, someone has to be able to tell, at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, whether it’s down and who it’s affecting.

That takes structured logs with a request ID, alerts that reach a person, backups that have been restored at least once, and deployments you can roll back in one step. A backup that has never been restored is just a folder.

None of those four things shows up in a demo. All of them show up the first day something goes wrong.

The rest of the list

• Migrating the data you already have. It’s always in worse shape than whoever hands it over says. It’s the most underestimated line item in the industry.
• Transactional email from an authenticated domain. Without SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up, your notifications land in your customers’ spam folder and nobody notices for weeks.
• Roles and permissions checked on the server. Hiding a button in the interface doesn’t stop anyone from calling the action behind it.
• Compliance: under the GDPR, a record of processing activities, a data processing agreement with every provider, and a cookie policy that matches what the site actually does.
• Accessibility. If you sell to the public sector or to a large company, they’ll require it, and retrofitting it costs far more than building it in.
• Training and rollout. On the day it opens to real users, someone has to be there.

None of these line items is optional in a product that charges money. All of them are optional in a product that’s only being shown.

What drives up the price of an MVP

Once the scope is written down, what pushes an MVP above its starting price is fairly predictable:

Factor	Impact
Number of flows and roles	The starting price covers two of each. Every new role multiplies the permission cases that have to be checked
Product integrations	Payment provider, e-signature, calendar, storage. Each one takes days, and third-party documentation is never as good as it looks
Data migration	Depends on the real state of what you have, and nobody knows until it’s opened up
Reports and exports	Cheap if there are three. Expensive if it’s “whatever each customer asks for”
Languages	The second one is the expensive one. The third is already cheap
Real-time features	They reach down into the architecture, well below the screens

And one factor that’s on no list and matters more than all of the above: how many people on your side have to approve each decision. A project with one decision-maker moves at the pace of development. With three, it moves at the pace of the busiest calendar.

What the second year costs

This is the second question nobody answers. Development is paid for once; the product lives for five years.

These are the recurring costs of a small SaaS in production:

Line item	How it’s billed
Running the application	Per request or per container. At low volume, single-digit amounts per month
Managed database	By compute and storage. Neon charges per compute hour and $0.35 per GB-month and has a free plan for small projects
Transactional email	By sending volume, in plan tiers
Payment provider	Stripe charges Spanish accounts 1.5% + €0.25 per transaction with a standard European Economic Area card, and 2.8% + €0.25 with a premium one
Storage and data egress	Egress is the line item that blows up bills on the big clouds
Ongoing evolution	€390 – €1,600/month, depending on how critical the product is and the hours included

List prices change every few months, so check them before putting them in a spreadsheet. The order of magnitude doesn’t change: for a vertical SaaS with dozens of customers, infrastructure is usually the small line item. The big one is human work, support and new features above all, and it’s still needed in the second year and the third.

A vendor who gives you a development price and no estimate of the running costs has answered half the question.

The margin almost nobody works out

This part is plain arithmetic.

If your product serves forty customers from a single installation, customer number forty-one costs you cents. There’s no new instance to set up or server to rent. Compute goes up a little, storage goes up a little, and that’s about it.

In services, serving customer forty-one costs roughly the same as serving the first: somebody’s hours. In a product, the marginal cost tends toward zero while the revenue doesn’t.

So a €25,000 investment, which would be a big expense for a services business, works differently for a product: it becomes the floor of a cost structure that barely grows as revenue grows. Run that calculation with your own numbers before deciding whether the quote is expensive.

How to compare two quotes that look nothing alike

Five questions to ask every vendor. Comparing the answers tells you more than comparing the figures:

1. What does this price NOT include? If the answer is “nothing, it’s all in there”, the vendor hasn’t thought through the scope.
2. What happens if I change something halfway through? There should be a written answer. “We’ll see” means you’ll see it on the next invoice.
3. Who exactly will write the code? A name. If the answer is “a team”, ask how many projects that team is running at once.
4. Who owns the code and the infrastructure accounts, and from when? Get it in writing.
5. What will this cost me per month a year from now? Anyone who doesn’t know has never run what they’re selling.

One answer disqualifies a vendor on its own: a fixed price with no scope document behind it. Nobody can commit to a figure for something they haven’t defined. Either they’ve defined it and aren’t showing you, or they haven’t, and the figure is worthless.

When it makes sense to spend less

Cut the scope before you cut the price. Chances are half of what you put in the MVP isn’t needed to bill your first customer.

The usual candidates to drop from the first phase, in order:

• Reports. A spreadsheet export almost always covers the first year.
• The second language. If your first ten customers all speak the same language, this is money sitting idle.
• The “nice to have” integrations. Wait until a paying customer asks for one.
• The polished admin panel. The panel has to exist; it doesn’t have to be pretty.
• The mobile app. If the product works well on a phone browser, the app can wait for the next phase and cost quite a bit less, because the backend will already be designed for it.

Dropping those five things from an MVP can take several thousand euros off the quote. It’s a conversation worth having with your vendor, even if it shrinks their invoice. If they won’t have it, you’ve learned something useful.

What never gets cut: permissions, backups, deployment and observability. Without those four, what you have is a demo.

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Want to see the figure for your case? The price of each phase is published on the pricing page, along with what moves each quote. And if what you have today is still a process your team runs by hand, the product design phase of custom SaaS exists precisely to put a firm price on everything else without committing to the whole project.