Build a SaaS platform you will not have to rewrite
I am Atif Iqbal, and I build SaaS products end to end: the data model, the tenancy boundary, billing, roles, the product itself and the deployment underneath it. One engineer from first migration to launch, so nothing is lost in a handover. Every build is quoted as a fixed price against a written scope.
Send the six answers the email template asks for and you get the weeks, the milestones and a fixed price back, usually within a day.
Four SaaS builds, with the weeks attached
Agency pages quote anything from $20,000 to $150,000 and leave you to guess where you land. Weeks are the honest unit, because they belong to what you are building rather than to who builds it.
| Build | What you get | Typical length | How it starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lean MVP | One core workflow, real users and real data. Accounts and roles, the feature the product exists for, deployment and backups. Billing by invoice until people are paying. | 7 to 9 weeks | A one-week scoping sprint that produces the written scope and the fixed price. |
| Production SaaS platform | Multi-tenant from the first migration, self-serve subscription billing, an admin back office, reporting, audit history and an API other systems can rely on. | 12 to 20 weeks | The same scoping sprint, plus the architecture decisions written down before the build. |
| Tenancy, billing and roles | The plumbing added to a product that has outgrown a single customer: tenant isolation with tests that prove it, Stripe subscriptions with webhook handling, and a permission model. | 3 to 8 weeks | A review of the current data model, because that decides which end of the range you are at. |
| No-code or AI-generated rescue | A Bubble, Lovable, Replit or agent-written codebase that worked for the first hundred users and now leaks, stalls or cannot be changed safely. Keep, harden or rebuild, decided on evidence. | Review in 1 week, then scoped | A fixed-fee review with written findings, before any commitment to the rebuild. |
If you are not sure which row you are in, that is what the architecture review is for: a fixed fee, a short engagement, and written findings on what to build first and which decisions are expensive to reverse.
The plumbing that is never optional
These are the parts AI scaffolding gets plausibly wrong and no customer thanks you for. They are in every quote, not offered as extras.
Tenant isolation you can test
Every query, job, cache key and file path scoped to a tenant, with negative tests that try to read another customer's data and must fail.
How it is doneBilling that survives retries
Signed, idempotent webhook handling, failed payments, plan changes mid-cycle and an entitlements check the product reads instead of the plan name.
How it is doneRoles and an audit log
Memberships rather than users bolted to one account, permissions enforced on the server, and a record of who changed what.
How it is doneOperations from week one
A deployment pipeline that is not one laptop, environments, error monitoring, and backups that have been restored at least once.
How it is doneHow the price is set
The weeks come from the scope and the rate comes from me, so the quote is one fixed figure, split into milestones you pay as each one ships. It names what is explicitly out of scope and the dates I do not control, such as an app store review or a payment provider's approval. Five things move the number more than anything else:
- 01How many kinds of user there are, and what each one is allowed to see
- 02Whether it takes money, and how: plans, seats, usage or a marketplace split
- 03Which other systems it has to talk to, and how good their APIs are
- 04Existing data that has to be migrated in from spreadsheets or an old system
- 05Compliance obligations around audit, retention and access to personal data
Where the money goes inside those weeks, and the four things you can safely cut from a first version, is broken down in what a SaaS MVP actually costs. How much of it AI genuinely shortens is in what the 3-10x speedup claims leave out.
Platforms already shipped
What founders ask before a SaaS build
How much does it cost to build a SaaS MVP?
A lean MVP is seven to nine weeks of engineering and a production platform is twelve to twenty. The price is those weeks multiplied by a rate, quoted as one fixed figure against a written scope and paid per milestone. The full breakdown, including what you can safely cut, is in the SaaS MVP cost article.
Do I need multi-tenancy from day one?
If more than one company will ever use the product, yes. Adding a tenant column to every table later is the most expensive retrofit in SaaS. Adding it in week one costs a day, and the negative tests that prove it works cost another.
Can you take over a Lovable, Bubble or AI-generated app?
Yes, and the first step is always a fixed-fee review rather than a quote. Some of these codebases are worth hardening, some only the data is worth keeping. A week of reading tells you which, before you pay for either.
Do you use AI to write the code?
Where it genuinely saves time, inside a harness of lint, type checks and tests it has to pass. The architecture, the tenancy boundaries and the billing logic are decided and reviewed by hand, because those are the parts AI gets plausibly wrong.
Which stack do you build SaaS on?
Laravel or Next.js with MySQL or Postgres, Stripe for billing, deployed to infrastructure you own. If you already have a stack and a team, I build in theirs rather than replacing it.
Who owns the code and the infrastructure?
You do, from the first commit. The repository, the cloud accounts and the Stripe account are yours, with access granted to me rather than the other way round, and ownership is assigned on final payment in the contract.
Tell me what the product does and who uses it. The weeks and the price come back with the scope.