Step 1. Research. Here you study everything about your product, detect a target audience, analyze your possible competitors, and define the price for your services. You can do it yourself entirely. However, there will be a chance of doing it wrong. For better results, hire a business analyst. Hourly rate is between $20 and $40, depending on the qualification, complexity of the project, and the residence.
Step 2. Feasibility study. Here you need to hire a development team. Along with business analysts, they will help you to detect the platform to build upon, the necessary features, and the most convenient cloud. Some companies do not charge for consulting. Some charge a usual hourly rate (from 20 to $100 depending on the country of residence)
Step 3. Prototyping. Here you create the first version of your product. However, you still don’t launch it.
Step 4. Design. Here UX/UI designers take into consideration your requirements and the nature of the product. Then they devise the convenient navigation and aesthetic looks of your website/app. The hourly rate is between $30-$60 per hour.
Step 5. Development. Frontend devs turn the design into code. Backend devs set the architecture. QAs test the final variant. The hourly rate for each teammate varies, depending on the qualification. The Project Manager will have a higher salary than the developer. On average, it is somewhere between $30-$70 per hour. However, it can rise to $130/hour if we talk about the development companies from West Europe and the USA. During this step, the website/app is ready for launch. Houston, let’s hope there will be no problems.
The price depends on the number of features, the complexity of the design, the domain, and the cloud. Usually, the price for SaaS products with the most basic features begins somewhere from $15 000, supposing you’ve found a cheap cloud and an outsourcing team with low hourly rates. There are articles on the Internet filled with tips on how to build a SaaS product for $0. Well, it is possible only if you use open source platforms and have experience in software development. This way, Rejoiner and Envoy created MVP for just $0. However, all of their founders had technical backgrounds.
Other articles state that the SaaS market is so huge right now that you need to add more zeros to the sum everyone tells you. It is true if you skip the MVP phase and start building a complex project from scratch. It is a waste of time and money if you have no experience in working with SaaS. We say the price is very individual for each project. In Ukraine, the hourly rates are from $30 to $60 per hour without affecting the quality of development. That’s why Ukraine is the best solution for MVP (and not only this).