SaaS
SaaS MVP in 8 Weeks: Realistic Timeline & Cost
Week-by-week breakdown of building a production-ready SaaS MVP in 8 weeks. Scope, costs, tech stack, and what you should NOT build.
An 8-week SaaS MVP is achievable if you cut scope aggressively and pick an opinionated stack. Here is the week-by-week plan I run with founders.
Week 1, Scope + architecture
Write the problem statement in 2 paragraphs. List every feature you think you need. Cut 60%. What remains is the MVP. Pick the stack: Next.js 14 + Postgres + Stripe + Vercel. Set up the repo, CI, and staging environment.
Weeks 2-3, Auth, billing, core schema
Auth (NextAuth or Clerk), Stripe subscriptions with webhook verification, core database schema with Prisma migrations, workspace model if multi-tenant. These are the boring parts that take the longest, finishing them early de-risks the entire build.
Weeks 4-5, Core product loop
Build the one thing that defines the product. If you are analytics SaaS, that is the data ingestion + dashboard. If you are project management, that is the project + task model. One core loop, shipped end-to-end with onboarding.
Weeks 6-7, Secondary features + admin
Everything else that made the cut, notifications, exports, settings, admin dashboard for you to support customers without engineering.
Week 8, Polish + launch
Landing page, pricing page, docs, analytics, error tracking (Sentry), logging (Axiom), launch checklist. Go live.
Cost
Base ₹1,00,000 / $10,000 plus typical feature set = ₹1,30,000-1,80,000 in INR or $10,600-13,000 in USD. Milestone billed 30% at kickoff, 40% end of week 5, 30% at launch.