A SaaS MVP budget has two parts: a one-time build (labor to design and ship version one) and recurring monthly costs (hosting, database, email, domain, payment fees). Build labor dominates, and it depends far more on scope and on who builds than on any tool price. Your first action: open a spreadsheet, create those two buckets, and list your must-have features as rows before you ask anyone for a quote.
I'm not going to give you a single "average MVP price". I don't have a primary source for one, and I can't verify the ranges that circulate online. What I can give you is the structure, the published prices of the platforms an early product typically sits on (checked on 2026-09-30), and the costs that quietly break budgets. It supports the broader software development cost: pricing for web apps and SaaS pillar.
How much does it cost to build a SaaS MVP?
The build cost equals hours of work multiplied by the rate of whoever does it, so scope and team choice move the number more than anything else.
For a sense of the rate side, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median annual wage for software developers was $135,980 in May 2025. Dividing by 2,080 working hours gives roughly $65 an hour as a wage-only floor. That is my arithmetic, and it excludes benefits, overhead, agency margin and freelancer pricing, all of which change it.
Consider a hypothetical feature list that takes 400 hours. At that wage floor the labor is about $26,000 before any overhead. Cut the list to 250 hours and the same floor drops to about $16,000. Do the same per feature rather than for the whole project at once, because that shows where the hours actually go. The point of the example is the lever: every feature you remove takes hours out of the build and surface area out of every recurring line afterwards.
Give every hour a row. A workable skeleton has six build lines. Discovery turns a vague idea into a concrete feature list. Design covers wireframes through a usable interface. Frontend is the app users click. Backend and database cover authentication, the data model, business logic and security rules. Payments cover checkout, subscriptions and webhooks. Testing and launch cover QA, deployment and the first round of fixes. Estimate each row separately, because the rows that feel small, like payments and security rules, are where estimates slip. Then add a recurring block for what happens after launch, which the next section covers.
What does a scoped build look like in practice? Callidus is a React, TypeScript and Firebase multi-tenant SaaS for UK aesthetic clinics. The case study says I built it solo between February and April 2026 (about ten weeks), after inheriting a failed FlutterFlow attempt with roughly 200 unresolved errors, and that I rebuilt it from scratch. It uses Stripe Connect Standard for payouts. My reading of that case is a recommendation, not a measurement: a tight feature list is cheaper to build correctly than a sprawling one is to rescue.
For the week-by-week view of where the labor goes, see the 12-week realistic SaaS MVP roadmap. To decide what to cut, use the SaaS MVP development guide.
What are the recurring monthly costs of a SaaS MVP?
Early recurring costs are often zero to tens of dollars a month, because the platforms publish free tiers, but each free tier has limits you should read before launch day.
The table below uses each vendor's pricing page, read on 2026-09-30. Prices change, so treat the links as the source of truth.
| Line | Free or entry tier | Next tier |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Free: 500 MB database, 50,000 monthly active users, 1 GB file storage, projects paused after 1 week of inactivity, 2 active projects | Pro from $25/month: 8 GB disk, 100,000 MAU, $10 monthly compute credits |
| Firebase | Spark, no payment method: Firestore 1 GiB, 50K reads, 20K writes and 20K deletes per day, Auth 50K MAU | Blaze pay-as-you-go; Cloud Functions need Blaze (no-cost up to 2M invocations/month, then $0.40 per million) |
| Vercel | Hobby $0, described as a starting place for a web app or personal project | Pro $20/month with a $20 usage credit |
| Resend (email) | Free: 3,000 emails/month, 100/day, 3 domains | Pro $20/month for 50,000 emails |
Sources: Supabase pricing, Firebase pricing, Vercel pricing, Resend pricing. A domain is an annual registrar fee that varies by extension, so I left the figure out.
Two details matter more than the headline price. First, Supabase pauses Free projects after a week of inactivity, so a quiet staging project can be asleep when you demo it. Second, Cloud Functions aren't available on Firebase's Spark plan, so a Firebase product with server-side logic, such as Stripe webhook handlers, typically moves to Blaze early. That's a pay-as-you-go plan with a no-cost allowance, not a fixed fee, but your card is now on file.
To see how this adds up, consider a hypothetical launch that moves from free tiers to paid ones: Supabase Pro at $25, Vercel Pro at $20 and Resend on its free plan comes to $45 a month plus a domain, with Stripe's percentage taken from each sale. That is a listed-price calculation, not a forecast, and usage-based overage would come on top. The useful exercise is to find which line crosses its free limit first, then price that line at its next tier.
Pizzeria Bestek shows the small-product shape. The case study describes a React and Supabase ordering site for a family-run pizzeria in Biograd na Moru, where Supabase Edge Functions send the order emails, and the restaurant owns the Supabase, Netlify and Resend accounts after handover. If you're still choosing a backend, the Supabase vs Firebase comparison covers the trade-offs.
How do payment processing fees work?
Payment processors charge a percentage of each transaction plus a fixed amount, so the cost scales with revenue and there's no monthly base line to budget.
Stripe's US pricing page lists 2.9% + 30 cents per successful domestic card transaction, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% if currency conversion is needed. It states that Stripe doesn't charge setup fees or monthly fees. Stripe Billing is priced separately, at 0.7% of Billing volume on the pay-as-you-go option, and Connect is listed as included with Payments at standard pricing, with a 0.25% starting fee for platforms that deploy their own payments pricing. Prices differ outside the United States, so check your country's page.
As a hypothetical, a $9 monthly subscription charged to a domestic card costs 2.9% of $9 plus $0.30, or about $0.56 at US rates, before any Billing fee. BookBed is a Flutter + Firebase + Stripe product. Its case study lists €9 per month for up to twenty units per tenant, and says the subscription infrastructure is wired and tested in Stripe live mode but not yet activated for paid traffic. So I'm describing a planned price, not revenue.
The mechanics of subscriptions, webhooks and failed payments are in the SaaS billing and payments guide, and how to present prices is in the B2B SaaS pricing page that converts.
What hidden costs do MVP budgets miss?
The hidden costs are scope creep, post-launch fixes, design polish, reach across platforms and languages, and maintenance, and none of them show up in a headline quote.
- Scope creep. Every "can we also add..." is build labor that wasn't in the estimate. Write the feature list down before work starts, and price additions as change requests.
- Post-launch fixes. No first version ships perfect. Reserve a block of developer time for the weeks after launch.
- Design polish. A functional MVP and a credible-looking one are different amounts of work.
- Cross-platform reach. BookBed runs on iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Linux and Windows from a single Flutter codebase, per its case study. That was an architecture decision, and it still costs testing time on each target.
- Localisation. Each language means UI strings and ongoing content. The Bestek case study lists four languages: Croatian, English, German and Italian, with branching email templates.
- Maintenance. Dependencies update and platform terms change. Reserve a small recurring allowance or the product decays.
How does solo versus agency change the budget?
An agency carries project management and overhead that a solo developer doesn't, so the same scope usually costs more there, while a solo build concentrates the risk in one person's availability and skills. I don't have a primary source for the size of that gap, so get two quotes against the same written feature list and compare line by line.
A well-scoped MVP suits a solo build, and Callidus, BookBed and Bestek were each built that way per their case studies. A larger or compliance-heavy product may justify an agency's depth.
Keep the spreadsheet alive after launch. Every month, compare what the platforms actually billed against the estimate, and write down why the difference exists. That habit turns the budget from a one-off guess into a number you can defend when a client or investor asks what the product costs to run.
Your next step: write your feature list, estimate hours for each row, and multiply by the rate you'd actually pay. Which three rows could you delete and still have something a customer would pay for?