The Fullest Guide on How to Build a SaaS Application
G Suite, Slack, Salesforce, and other SaaS solutions bring a bunch of digital changes to businesses of all kinds. Itâs expected that over 86% of mobile startups will go SaaS by the end of 2022.
Saas market is booming, and a lot of companies are picking this model for long-term, easily predictable profit. Here is what statistics says:
- Global SaaS market will reach 380 million by 2021.
- SaaS organizations operate in over 100 countries.
- Companies use an average of 34 SaaS apps.
But why are SaaS apps popular among businesses and service providers? How to build SaaS? How much does it cost to develop a SaaS platform? In this article, weâll dive into all the details of building SaaS applications.
Table of contents
What Is Saas: Benefits and Examples
Software as a Service, also known as SaaS, stands for a cloud-based solution that can be used via mobile apps or browsers. Using such a service, customers donât need to install and configure the app since the software provider handles it. Thanks to the internet, SaaS is available to users all over the world and from every device.

What is SaaS?
There are a bunch of SaaS products on the market from office software (GSuite) to messengers for work (Slack).
There is a difference between building SaaS apps and traditional ones. After launching a SaaS product, developers continue working on it. Itâs required to update the service regularly to gain more users and stand up to the competition. Enterprises like Amazon, Salesforce, and Box have development teams to keep their solutions up to date.
Why Do Tech Companies Go SaaS?
SaaS solutions have a high potential for improving the business. Weâve singled out several advantages.
- Cost efficiency. Using a SaaS service, there is no need to buy and maintain expensive hardware. Itâs common for Saas solutions to offer paid subscriptions. So, the company pays for the required functionality and can stop paying if the business doesnât need the service.
- Scalability. Due to the subscription, businesses can pay only for the services that they need. If requirements change, itâs easy to upgrade the subscription plan with a few clicks.
- Reliability. SaaS is a cloud-based solution. A cloud stands for a network of services that can be placed all over the world. So, even if one server goes down, SaaS products still work.
- Security. Any cloud service provider tends to consider security issues. As a result, all the information is well-protected and is stored in a safe place.

Why use SaaS?
Cloud-based solutions are accessible from various devices (like laptops, tablets, and smartphones) from any place in the world. Itâs important for workers that have a bunch of business trips. They can work anywhere and anytime.
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Top Five Strongest SaaS Providers on the Market
According to the G2 crowd report, weâve singled out the top five SaaS companies to inspire while building a SaaS product. These companies provide their software to many businesses from all over the world. The list is based on customer reviews, social networks, and online sources.
Google owns 137 products that offer Internet-related services for digital analytics, document creation, and others. Google provides a bunch of applications like Google Drive, Google Document, and Google Sheet.
Slack
Slack is a famous chat letting coworkers to collaborate with each other. It offers messaging, video and audio calls, and a bunch of useful bots. A lot of enterprises use Slack for internal communication among employees.
Salesforce
This is a well-known SaaS company that helps e-commerce businesses. The service offers multiple solutions for CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, and so on.
Shopify
One more SaaS provider for ecommerce and retail industries. There are three leading solutions â Shopify, Shopify Plus, Burst by Shopify.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful CRM platform that helps manage customers. There are such solutions as CRM, HubSpot Sales, HubSpot Academy, and others.

Top SaaS companies and their total funding amount
How to Develop a SaaS Application from Scratch
Building SaaS products differs from usual mobile app development. The primary difference in creating cloud-based solutions is the need for a reliable cloud service provider.
One of the most popular providers is Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offers a bunch of cool tools for SaaS developers.
Learn how we created and configured AWS server architecture for Occaz, a service app where everyone can check a car's state before buying the vehicle.
How to create a SaaS platform and reach success? You need to invest time and energy and learn your customersâ needs and demands.
Weâve singled out the six steps to building a SaaS product.
Step #1. Think of the Value You Bring
To gain users for your SaaS product, you need to offer a solid and valuable solution. Customers want to understand the value of the product before subscribing and paying for it.
For example, itâs a good idea to offer a free trial period for a certain period of time. In this case, customers can understand the value and benefits that your SaaS service brings them. Also, you can offer to pay for a single use of the platform. Itâll be convenient for users that donât use the service a lot.
Step #2. Do the Market Research and Consider Your Competitors
Starting to build a SaaS app, you need to know the market and understand your target audience. Itâs good to analyze competitors, the features of their solutions, business models, and so on.
Having analyzed the market, you can realize how to make your SaaS solution stand out from the existing products.
Step #3. Collect Project Requirements
Before starting the development process, you need to consider all your project requirements.
Itâs necessary to create a list of features. They can be different. Itâs common to divide app features into two main groups â basic and advanced. MVP or basic features stand for features that are required to satisfy the user needs. As for advanced, they add some exciting functions to engage more users.
Speaking of SaaS solutions, itâs common to consider three types of features:
- Functional tools. There are primary features of the SaaS service. For example, Slack should offer an opportunity to send messages and make video calls.
- Analytical tools. Any CRM system should offer a bunch of reports, statistics, and more.
- Management tools. SaaS solutions should provide an opportunity to choose user roles. According to the chosen role, they need to have various features and access layers to the SaaS product.

How to build a SaaS app: required features
Step #4. Pay Attention to UI/UX Design
Having a list of required features, itâs time to create a great UI/UX design for your SaaS product. Users are quite spoilt these days. They tend to abandon websites and apps with unattractive and unclear designs. So, to make a SaaS app profitable, you need to create a user-friendly design.
The design process requires time and money. Everything starts with wireframes. They stand for a schematic placement of elements on the app screen. Wireframes tend to be monochrome and show the screen's connection.

Wireframes
After that, designers create a visual style of your future app. They pick the appropriate colors, fonts, and other graphic elements.
Itâs time to create a design. Designers create all the app screens and their conditions. After that, they make a clickable prototype. The last step of the UI/UX design process is handing over the design to developers.
Want to know more about the UI/UX design process? Weâve created the guide to discuss all the design steps.
Step #5. Work on Your Pricing Strategy
Pricing strategy is a significant part of any SaaS product. Itâs common to offer a subscription plan.
You need to create several plans according to the user's needs and expectations. Additionally, itâs good to add several free functions or provide a free trial period. For example, Google Drive allows using 15 GB for free. However, if you need more storage, you can buy a monthly subscription.
Also, SaaS providers offer subscriptions for various numbers of users. There can be from 3 to 1,000 accounts.
Step #6. Define Tech Stack
Choosing the technologies for your SaaS app is a complicated task. You need to show the project requirements, features, and design to the developers. They can select the required technologies to create a SaaS application.
You need to keep your solution up to date, so itâs required to pick tools that allow scaling the solution.
To give you a hint, we listed the Salesforce tech stack below.
Application and data
- Akamai
- Cloudant
- ClearDB
Utilities
- Google Analytics
- Twilio
- Optimizely
- Heap
- Recurly
- Zuora
- Cyfe
- TransmogrifAI
DevOps
- Jenkins
- Bitbucket
- New Relic
- Datadog
- Puppet Labs
- Cloud9 IDE
- Sauce Labs
- StillAlive
Business tools
- Jira
- G Suite
- InVision
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Balsamiq
- DocuSign
- UXPin

Technologies used to develop Salesforce
Tech Difficulties to Build a SaaS Application
Creating a SaaS product can be challenging due to many difficulties on the tech side.
Scalability
Letâs face it â to make your SaaS product successful, you need to choose a scalable tech stack. A complex solution has to be customizable at each layer. As a result, developers should consider the following aspects:
- Interface
- Integrations
- List of features (must-have and advanced)
- Page templates
- URL structure
Scalabile products will let you attract users and bring value in the long-run.
Security
SaaS solutions often work with business segments and process/keep a lot of sensitive information. As a SaaS vendor, you need to guarantee data privacy to your users.
Such information as bank data, personal data, and customersâ information may leak due to lack of security. Itâll lead to losing your customers and their trust. Additionally, you can pay an enormous fine.
Reliability
The AWS SaaS architecture tends to be the most reliable service for cloud software maintenance. AWS takes care of its hardware and backups all the data securely. Itâs a huge benefit of using this solution.
Your customers should trust and rely on your services. Itâs better to pay attention to every single detail like logo, UI/UX design, colors, and more.
Integrations
Every SaaS application has a bunch of third-party integrations like Google Maps, PayPal, and others. In other words, any kind of addition of features based on other software is a third-party integration.
It requires a lot of expertise and effort to develop a SaaS application well. Additionally, the number of integrations affect the final price.
Also, it is vital to test these integrations properly with manual or automated tests for proper working.
How Much Does It Cost to Build a SaaS Platform?
The final cost of building a SaaS product varies on the following factors.
- The complexity of features
- Hiring option
- The teamâs hourly rates
- The number of third-party integrations
The Complexity of Features
How to calculate the price of creating a SaaS application?
You need to multiply the time needed for development by the developersâ rates.
The development time depends on the featuresâ complexity. The more complicated the feature is, the more time developers need to implement it.
Letâs consider Slack as an example. To create an app like Slack (MVP version), you need at least 2632 hours. You can study the details below.
Type of work | Development time |
---|---|
iOS | 852 hours |
Android | 852 hours |
Back-end | 768 hours |
UI/UX design (for one platform) | 80 hours |
Total hours | 2632 hours |
Weâve estimated the approximate cost to make an app like Slack for iOS and Android in different regions of the world:
- Eastern Europe. $131,600 (based on $50/h)
- North America. $263,200 (based on $100/h)
- Western Europe. $236,880 (based on $90/h)
- Australia. $263,200 (based on $100/h)
Hiring Options for SaaS App Development
Where to hire SaaS developers?
There are three popular options to employ software engineers â cooperate with a freelance developer, create an in-house team, or find a reliable vendor.

Platforms to hire SaaS app developers
Freelance developers
Freelance employment is quite widespread these days. However, SaaS development requires long-term cooperation, and that can be complicated with freelance engineers. They can switch to another project and fail deadlines.
Additionally, itâs challenging to check the candidate's knowledge and skills unless youâre a tech guru.
In-house SaaS developers
Creating your own development team can be quite profitable if youâve already released the product to the market and got some profit. For example, several investors are interested in your solution, and you need to improve the app.
However, this hiring option tends to be expensive due to a bunch of additional expenses like office rent, hardware,software, taxes, and so on. Thatâs why it fits best to established companies that need to extend their team.
Outsourced development team
Outsourcing is gaining popularity due to affordable hourly rates, talented developers, and high quality of the final product.
There are many offshore software development companies all over the world, so you can hire developers from anywhere to create a SaaS app.
In our experience, in-house developers or offshore software development companies are the most suitable option to build a SaaS product.
Hourly Rates
Developers usually have an hourly rate. They can vary according to three factors â hiring options (freelancers, in-house teams, or outsourcing companies), qualification (junior, middle, senior), and region of the world.
For example, freelance developers have lower hourly rates than engineers from an in-house team. Moreover, the region is also significant. Developers from the USA have higher rates in comparison to the developers from Eastern Europe. Junior mobile app developers have lower hourly rates compared to their senior colleagues.
Below you can see the developersâ rates in various regions.
Region | Developers' rates ($/hour) |
---|---|
North America | $150-200/hour |
Western Europe | $50-$149/hour |
Eastern Europe | $25-$49/hour |
Oceania | $100-$150/hour |
Asia | $20-$40/hour |
South America | $25-$49/hour |
Cleveroad Expertise
Cleveroad has 6+ years of experience in building high-quality SaaS solutions. We want to share one of our latest cases â RetailOps.

RetailOps
RetailOps is a versatile SaaS product that provides a bunch of tools for retail companies.
We started redesigning the app to make it more easy-to-use. Weâve reengineered RetailOps and made it run on Swift (native language for iOS development) instead of Cordova.
The application is integrated with the Socket Mobile barcode scanner utilizing its SDK. That means an iPhone can connect with the scanner via Bluetooth.
The application helps to track every movement of inventory from the moment it arrives on a warehouse to the minute it ships.
Make your business better
Letâs create a Saas solution for your business to improve your business.
The final cost of building a SaaS product varies on the following factors.
- The complexity of features
- Hiring option
- The teamâs hourly rates
- The number of third-party integrations
Weâve singled out the six steps to building a SaaS product.
- Step #1. Consider the Service Value
- Step #2. Do the Market Research and Consider Your Competitors
- Step #3. Collect the Project Requirements
- Step #4. Pay Attention to the UI/UX Design
- Step #5. Work on Your Pricing Strategy
- Step #6. Define Tech Stack
According to the G2 crowd report, weâve singled out the top five SaaS companies for you to inspire while building a SaaS product.
- Slack
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- HubSpot
Itâs impossible to calculate the time required for developing a SaaS without project requirements. Itâs better to calculate the final time and price with professionals. They can consider all your requirements and business goals.
Software as a Service, also known as SaaS, stands for a cloud-based solution that can be used via mobile app or Internet browser. Using such a service, customers donât need to install and configure the app since the software provider handles it. Thanks to the internet, SaaS is available to users all over the world and from every device.
There are a bunch of SaaS products on the market from office software (Google Apps) to working messengers (Slack).
Comments
Nice text)
I want to make a SaaS solution for e-commerce business. I like the piece of information you shared with us. The text is useful and easy-to-read for beginners and startupers.
Thanks for sharing
Hello! I found this article very useful. It is interesting to know how Cleveroad is helps make SaaS solutions for various industries. I think that SaaS apps are profitable for e-commerce and retail.
Thanks for the valuable information you shared with us
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