I built a SaaS platform solo for under $5K. Here's the full cost breakdown.

Google "SaaS development cost" and every result says the same thing: "It depends." Then they show a range from $35,000 to $500,000 and tell you to book a discovery call.

Here's a different answer. One with receipts.

I'm Jeff Cadet, a full-stack developer. I built TradeProof, a compliance SaaS that verifies contractor licenses across all 50 US states. 3.6 million records. Stripe billing with five pricing tiers. Zero-downtime deploys.

Most bootstrapped SaaS founders spend $40,000 to $65,000 in their first year. My infrastructure cost was under $5,000. Here's where every dollar went.

What TradeProof actually cost to build

Monthly infrastructure

Third-party services

Development time, where the real cost lives

Servers are cheap. Time is not.

At current freelance rates of $60 to $150/hour for full-stack developers, depending on experience and location, that's $39,600 to $99,000 in development cost.

I built it myself, so my out-of-pocket was time plus $36/month.

What's actually cheap and what isn't

Authentication is cheap now. Services like Clerk and NextAuth handle login, signup, sessions, and OAuth in hours. Nobody should build this from scratch anymore.

Payments are cheap. Stripe's documentation is excellent. A working billing integration with subscriptions, webhooks, and a customer portal takes two to three days, not two to three weeks.

Hosting is cheap. A $35/month virtual machine handles thousands of concurrent users. You do not need Kubernetes on day one.

Email is cheap. Resend, Postmark, and SendGrid all have generous free tiers.

Here's what isn't cheap.

Integrations with external systems. Every third-party API, government portal, and data source has its own format, rate limits, and failure modes. Budget double what you estimate. I'm serious.

Security. TradeProof went through a 130-finding security audit before processing a single payment. Input validation, dependency auditing, secrets management, penetration testing. It took 60 hours. Cutting corners here costs more later, always.

The last 20%. Getting a feature to "mostly works" takes 20% of the effort. Getting it to "production-ready" takes the other 80%. Error handling, edge cases, empty states, loading states. The stuff nobody sees until it's missing.

Maintenance. A SaaS is never finished. Bug fixes, scaling, dependency updates, feature requests. Plan for 10 to 20 hours per month minimum after launch.

Three ways to build a SaaS

Hire an agency

$75,000 to $500,000+. Four to twelve months.

You get a team of specialists, a project manager, and polished deliverables. You also get a long timeline, multiple revision rounds, and invoices that include overhead for office space, sales teams, and account managers you'll never meet.

Best for funded startups with $200K+ budgets.

Hire a freelance developer

$15,000 to $100,000. Two to six months.

Direct communication. Faster iteration. Lower overhead. You're paying for one person's skill and time, not an organization's infrastructure. The risk is finding the right person. The gap between a good freelancer and a bad one is enormous.

Best for bootstrapped founders who want production quality without agency overhead.

Build it yourself

$500 to $5,000 in infrastructure. Three to twelve months.

Full control, deepest understanding of your product, lowest cash cost. But the time cost is real. If you're learning as you build, the timeline doubles. This is what I did with TradeProof.

Best for technical founders willing to invest hundreds of hours.

Tools that save serious money

If I were starting from scratch today, I'd use these. They would have saved me 100+ hours.

These weren't all available, or as mature, when I started TradeProof.

How to evaluate a SaaS developer before you hire

Ask for live URLs, not GitHub repos. A running SaaS with real users proves everything a portfolio can't.

Check if they handle the full stack. Database, API, frontend, deployment, security. If they need to subcontract three specialists, you're paying agency prices without the agency.

See if they bring up security before you do. Ask about authentication, input validation, secrets management. A vague answer is a red flag.

Listen for honest timelines. "Six to eight weeks for an MVP" is realistic. "Two weeks for the whole thing" means corners are getting cut.

Ask what happens after launch. Monitoring, maintenance, updates. If the conversation ends at delivery, the relationship will too.

Three mistakes I made

I launched in all 50 states at once. I wanted full coverage from day one. Starting with 10 high-value states would have gotten me to first revenue three months sooner. Build for your best customers first.

I self-hosted the database to save money. PostgreSQL in Docker saved me $20/month, about $240/year. It cost me easily $3,000 worth of time in backups, monitoring, and incident response. Not worth it.

I waited too long to charge. Built for months before adding Stripe. Charging early, even a small amount, validates demand faster than any amount of building. The hardest product question isn't "can I build this?" It's "will anyone pay for this?"

So what does a SaaS actually cost?

Between $15,000 and $250,000+ depending on complexity, team, and how much you build versus buy. Most bootstrapped founders land between $40,000 and $65,000 in year one.

The biggest cost isn't servers or tools. It's time. Hire someone who's done it before, scope tight, launch before it feels ready.

If you have a SaaS idea

I build these end-to-end. Database, API, frontend, billing, security, deployment. No subcontractors, no handoffs.

If you want an honest conversation about what your project would take, not a sales pitch, let's talk. No contracts or fees for the first conversation.

See my work, including TradeProof, which this whole article is based on.