How Much Does It Cost to Build a SaaS in 2025?
You can build a SaaS for $0 per month or drop $50,000 before writing a single line of code. The difference? Knowing exactly what you're paying for and why. Most solo founders can build and run a complete SaaS for under $100 monthly in 2025. Free tiers from Supabase, Vercel, and modern development tools are more generous than ever. The real cost isn't infrastructure it's marketing and customer acquisition.
You can build a SaaS for $0 per month or drop $50,000 before writing a single line of code. The difference? Knowing exactly what you're paying for and why.
Here's what nobody tells you: the actual SaaS infrastructure costs are the smallest part of your budget. I've built multiple SaaS products, and the pattern is always the same. Founders obsess over hosting bills while ignoring the real money drains.
This guide breaks down the actual numbers from 2025. You'll see real pricing from Supabase, Vercel, and every tool in between, plus three complete cost breakdowns from actual products.
The Two Cost Categories That Actually Matter
Every SaaS expense falls into two buckets: building costs or running costs.
Building costs are your one-time investment. Development time, initial tool setup, and any boilerplate you buy. The trade-off is simple: time versus money. Spend 300 hours building yourself for free, or pay someone $15,000 to build it in six weeks.
Running costs are your monthly SaaS hosting costs and operational expenses. Database, hosting, domain, email, and eventually marketing. These never stop and scale with growth. Most have generous free tiers that can carry you surprisingly far.
The mistake most founders make is optimizing the wrong category. They spend weeks hunting for a hosting provider that's $5 cheaper per month while their product sits unbuilt.
Development Costs: Four Realistic Paths
The $0 Solo Builder Path
You'll invest 200 to 500 hours depending on complexity, but your cash outlay is zero.
Your toolset is completely free: VS Code, GitHub, and free tier services. Supabase gives you a 500MB database, 1GB file storage, and supports up to 50,000 monthly active users. Vercel's hobby tier includes 100GB bandwidth and unlimited projects.
The catch? Your database pauses after a week of inactivity. For pre-launch, that's fine.
Hiring Freelancers
Junior developers charge $25-50 per hour ($5,000-15,000 total). Senior developers command $75-150 per hour ($15,000-40,000 total). The premium buys better architectural choices and cleaner code.
Offshore developers cost 40-60% less than US-based developers. The trade-off is communication overhead and different time zones.
No-Code Reality Check
Bubble.io starts at $29 per month, going up to $349 for production apps.
No-code works brilliantly for simple CRUD applications and MVPs. Problems emerge when you need custom features or serious scale. Most platforms hit a wall around 10,000 users. At that point, you're either rebuilding from scratch or paying premium prices for platform-specific developers.
Agency Route
Agencies quote $30,000-150,000. Unless you've validated your market and raised capital, avoid this path. Most bootstrappers burn through savings paying agencies to build products nobody wants.
Monthly Infrastructure: The Complete Free Stack
Database & Backend
Supabase free tier: 500MB database, 1GB file storage, theoretically 100,000 monthly active users. Database pauses after a week of inactivity.
Supabase Pro: $25 monthly plus usage. You get 8GB database space, 100GB bandwidth, no activity pauses.
Alternative: Railway offers managed PostgreSQL starting at $5 per month.
Hosting Your Next.js App
Vercel hobby tier: 100GB bandwidth and 150,000 serverless function invocations monthly, free forever.
Vercel Pro: $20 monthly with 1 million function invocations. That supports substantial traffic before you need to worry about scaling.
Netlify offers similar free tiers. Cloudflare Pages is emerging with even more generous bandwidth limits.
AI API Costs
Claude Haiku: $0.25 per million input tokens, $1.25 per million output tokens. OpenAI GPT-3.5: $0.002 per thousand tokens.
Budget rule: 1,000 active users generating AI content costs $50-200 monthly, depending on usage patterns.
Three Real SaaS Cost Examples
Simple CRUD SaaS
Feedback collection tool or simple directory. Development: 150 hours, $0 cash. Monthly: Vercel free hosting, Supabase free database, domain at $12 yearly, Resend free tier for email.
Total monthly cost: $1
AI-Powered SaaS
AI writing assistant or content generation tool. Development: $0-1,000 (boilerplate) plus 200 hours.
Monthly: Vercel Pro $20, Supabase Pro $25, OpenAI API $100-300, domain and email $15.
Total monthly cost: $160-360
Still remarkably affordable for a product that could generate $1,000+ monthly revenue within months.
B2B Platform
Team collaboration or project management system. Development: $5,000-15,000 if hiring help.
Monthly: Supabase Team plan $599, Vercel Pro per team member $20, monitoring $50, support software $100.
Total monthly cost: $800-1,200
B2B products typically charge $50-200 per user monthly, so infrastructure should be a small percentage of revenue.
The Hidden Costs That Kill Bootstrappers
Payment processing eats 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction through Stripe. On $1,000 monthly revenue, that's $29 in fees.
Marketing is the real killer. You'll typically need 8-10% of revenue on growth. Early-stage SaaS companies often allocate 20-40% of revenue toward customer acquisition.
Legal and compliance: $500-2,000 for proper terms of service and privacy policy. If handling sensitive data, double that.
Customer support tools: $50-200 monthly. Monitoring services: $20-100. These feel optional until you have paying customers demanding reliable service.
How to Build for $0-100/Month
Maximize Free Tiers
Stay under Supabase's 500MB database and 50,000 monthly active user limits. Optimize images and use static generation on Vercel to reduce bandwidth. Use GitHub Actions for CI/CD (2,000 free minutes monthly).
Resend or SendGrid both offer free tiers handling hundreds of daily emails.
Smart Architecture Choices
Static site generation beats server-side rendering for cost efficiency. Use edge caching aggressively. Cloudflare's free tier can reduce server load by 60-80%.
Batch API calls instead of making them per-request. Use webhooks instead of polling. Polling burns through function invocations; webhooks let services notify you only when something changes.
Marketing & Launch Costs
Product Hunt launch: $0 for organic to $500+ for promoted. Content marketing delivers the best ROI but requires consistent effort over months.
Paid ads: budget at least $500-1,000 monthly to get meaningful data. Community building costs nothing but time. This is how I got my first paying customers for BangerBase.
Your First Year: Realistic Budget Planning
Months 1-3 (Building): $0-30 monthly. Mostly free tiers, maybe a domain.
Months 4-6 (Launch): $50-200 monthly. You've launched, upgraded services as usage grows, started basic marketing.
Months 7-12 (Growth): $200-1,000 monthly. Revenue hopefully covers this. You're spending on marketing, better tools, and infrastructure.
Year 1 Total: $1,000-5,000 for lean bootstrap. With aggressive marketing: $5,000-15,000.
The pattern: you can build and validate a SaaS idea for under $100 monthly. Real costs come when you're ready to grow, which means you're already making money.
The Bottom Line
The cost to build a SaaS in 2025 ranges from $0 to $50,000+, but that massive range reflects your choices, not the inherent cost of building software.
Most solo founders can build and run a complete SaaS for under $100 monthly. Free tiers are more generous than ever. The modern stack (Next.js, Supabase, Vercel) is built for bootstrappers.
The biggest cost isn't infrastructure. It's marketing and customer acquisition. You can build an amazing product for pennies and watch it die from zero traffic.
Smart architecture choices keep costs minimal even as you scale. Understanding how to maximize free tiers, optimize for edge caching, and batch expensive operations makes the difference between a $50 monthly bill and a $500 one.
Start free, stay lean, and scale your infrastructure costs with your revenue. Your SaaS doesn't need enterprise infrastructure until it has enterprise customers.