Bringing your product vision to reality with growing revenue is the biggest dream of every business entrepreneur.

It’s often believed that developing a SaaS MVP product requires months of hard work, immense efforts, massive investment, and long hours.

Many startups often fail to succeed in the way of MVP development. According to the report, 42% of the apps fail as the app was not in demand by the market.

The Lean methodology introduced by Eric Ries will help you answer the question: Why do your users need your product? MVP enables you to understand this most efficiently.

Also Read: MVP Development: The Complete Guide

The million-dollar companies are gaining popularity and having millions of active users increasing every passing day, leading to the evolution of new startups to build a new innovative SaaS products.

SaaS MVP products test the viability of their product idea and help enterprises build robust and innovative products.

The SaaS market is expected to reach $623 billion by 2023, with an annual growth rate of 18%.

What Is SaaS MVP Development?

SaaS MVP is a working prototype that comprises all necessary features that include in the final product. In simple terms, it is a prototype of a cloud-based application that depicts all critical elements that’ll define the final product. The minimum viable product helps you gather relevant information from end-users about how they interact with the product. MVP helps you test your idea in a limited time and ensures it improves every time it modifies on user feedback.

MVP approach is highly beneficial to companies who have a small budget to get their idea tested in the market rather than losing it all on the full-fledged products. 

Here’s the specialist’s team required for developing SaaS MVP projects are:

• Manager/analyst
• Front-end developer
• Backend developer
• UI / UX designer
• DevOps
• QA (frontend and backend both)

The global market for SaaS products is estimated to be worth $60.36 billion with a 9% CAGR.

Factors That Influence SaaS MVP Development Cost

There are different factors involved in SaaS MVP Development. Additional cost entails in MVP development are primarily similar to product development. Still, there are many other costs required to convert an MVP product into a full-fledged product.

Let’s have a look into it.

Size Of The Development Team

How many people did you require to build an MVP development team? You need the most experienced and skilled pool of talented professionals. However, the more talented professionals you hire, the higher it costs to develop a SaaS MVP.

Also, when outsourcing, there is a higher cost involved than an in-house team. With the number of designers, developers, testers onboard in the team, the MVP cost will go high.

Technology Stack

It is preferred to use robust, scalable, and popular technologies to develop a SaaS MVP product. Choosing the right set of tech stacks incurs a considerable cost when planning for developing MVP. To transform your product idea into reality needs the latest tech expert. You must calculate everything to analyze the tech stack, starting from the programming language, front-end, and back-end and other SaaS frameworks. 

Feature Complexity

It is crucial to consider the complexity of features required to build SaaS MVP. If MVP SaaS’s features and functionality are complex, there would be less or no chances of a fast and smooth MVP development process. 

Make sure you focus on the core functionality and implement those features that a SaaS MVP cannot survive. Also, you don’t need to implement extra functionality when it’s a startup development process.

Read also: How Much Does MVP Development Cost in 2021 - Learn To Calculate

Development Approach

One of the most critical factors determining MVP cost is companies’ development approaches to develop a SaaS MVP product. Some companies get their MVP developed by their in-house teams. MVP development in-house means setting development teams, tech infrastructure, and many other costs.

On the other hand, some get it outsourced to other companies. Software development outsourcing means delegating your complete development process to an external team. Here you save all your operational costs and time.

Designing Costs

Every product design needs to be impeccable and classy to attract customers. For this, companies need to hire a skilled design team that can design each screen of the app. The design team will help you with smooth navigation, right button positioning, and others required elements to deliver a seamless user experience.

MVP Development Stages And Costs Involved

Just above, we have discussed the main factors determining the cost of developing an MVP. To make it clear and straightforward for you to calculate cost based on each stage of MVP development. You can have save on MVP Development costs as well through outsourcing. However, let's first calculate the costs through each step before moving forward. 

Step 1. Conduct an In-Depth Research

Do in-depth research on everything about your product idea, and analyze your target audience, business requirements, competitors, and product development budget. All these tasks involve a specific cost. You can independently execute all these business operations or, if not, hire an outsourcing company or team of professionals. The hourly rate of developers is between $20 and $40, based on their expertise, experience, and project complexity.

Step 2.  Perform Feasibility Analysis

 In this stage, you determine whether you need to hire a development team or an outsourcing vendor. They help you choose the platform on which product or app to develop and features and functionality, the tech stack, and the most convenient cloud. Some companies charge hourly rates for consultation from $20 to $100, based on the location.

Step 3. Prototyping

It is the first version of your MVP product. It is just a model of your SaaS MVP product that has minimal features which act as a base for your MVP. You can then test the prototype with minimal features among your early adopters.

Step 4. Design

 In this stage, UX/UI designers help you to delight your early adopters from actual raw products to innovative, engaging, and full-fledged products. They give your product an impeccable design, easy navigation, and aesthetic looks that entice your targeted customers. 

Your design process includes planning and creating the mockup of the MVP. It might cost around $500 or more for wireframing and about $500-$1,000 for the mockup. The more complicated your MVP becomes, the more interactions it would need in the design, approximately, and the price would increase accordingly. You can also add more screens to your MVP product if required. Also, it cost you more with each additional screen.

Step 5. Development Phase

In this development stage, frontend developers turn the design into code whereas, backend developers construct the hardware. And finally, Quality Analyst professionals test the final product. You can go with complete product development or simply find the minimum marketable product for your MVP to launch first. 

The MVP development team includes developers, designers, and testers. The hourly rate of developers based on different locations are as follows:

• Western Europe $110-$300
• Australia-$100-$180
• North America $150
• Eastern Europe-$20-$50
• India-$15-$25

You can choose from any location to hire remote developers depending on your project requirements, the resources available, and the complexity of your MVP. 

SaaS MVP Development Cost Based On Hiring Resources/Company

SaaS MVP development requires a pool of talented professionals to build a top-notch product. Your MVP development team includes designers, developers, testers, QA, and so on.  If hiring an in-house development team does not satisfy your project requirements or is insufficient to build and skyrocket a digital product, you may choose the other option, i.e., outsourcing MVP development.

Let’s see what resources you required to build SaaS MVP:

1. Hiring In-house Team

When developing MVP in-house, the cost includes the remuneration given to the developers, infrastructure setup, hardware & software costs, training professionals, and other operational costs. 

It will cost around $178,770 for hiring an in-house development team.

Also, you can check out the costs in the table below. 

2. Outsourcing MVP Development

The second option to build SaaS product is to hire professionals via outsourcing MVP development. The outsourcing vendor assists you in executing specific business processes or even takes complete responsibility for end-to-end MVP development. 

Outsourcing software development helps companies to launch their MVP product faster. Here, outsourcing MVP development comprises the hourly rate of developers/team, their hiring cost, etc.

 The outsourcing cost is around $38,100 for the same number of developers and the hours worked.

3. Hiring Freelancers 

If you don’t have the required funds to hire the entire outsourcing company, you have another option to build your MVP product: hire remote developers or even hire freelancers.

You can easily hire freelancers from popular platforms like Freelancer, Remote, Upwork, etc. Here you get the skilled expertise and years of experience as freelancers working on a niche project.

The average rate of hiring a  graphic designer is approximately $25 per hour. 

Cost Involved In Building An App Like Twitter And Instagram

Wondering how much cost is involved in building an app like Twitter and Instagram? Let's have a look at it.

Twitter

Today’s “ Twitter”  was once known as “Twttr” and started its business as a free alternative to SMS services.  The company, in its initials, invented hashtags along with 140-symbol messaging.

The professionals at Twitter focus on a targeted set of customers to test the viability of business hypotheses. They focused on the core features first. The present features do not include the first version of the app.

So, if you want to build an app similar to the most popular and trending app like Twitter, it would cost you around $50 000.

But if you want the exact lookalike of Twitter with the price of $250, 000. The development time takes from 3 to 6 months. Presently, Twitter has around 300 million active users.

Instagram

The famous and most popularly used app Instagram was once known by the name “Burbun”. It is the app same as Facebook, where you can share photos, check-in anywhere, share stories, etc.

Instagram was developed in just two months. It was sold for $1 billion to Facebook in the year 2012.

Presently, the Instagram growth rate is more than 2.3 billion users per month and over 600 million active users. The numbers keep on rising with every passing day.

So, if you want to build an app like Instagram, it would cost you around $100 000.

And the exact look-alike of Instagram will cost up to $300 000. The development time it takes to build such an app is 3 to 6 months.

Read Also-Remote developers & SaaS development

Concluding Thoughts

Be it a startup, product company, or SaaS enterprise, MVP development helps you test your idea to the finest. It helps you build a top-notch product or an app without investing your additional time and money.

The more complex your features or the deeper you go into the product development, the higher your investment cost.

Hence, the SaaS MVP development cost will depend on your product roadmap, use cases, development approach, product strategy, and so on. You can outsource software development to save more costs on building your saaS MVP.