Every “I built a SaaS with no money” post I read while I was building mine left out the part I actually needed, which was the invoices. So here are the invoices.
I shipped a scheduling product to the App Store and Google Play without raising anything. Not because bootstrapping is noble — because there was no other option available to me. That is a different starting position from most founder stories and it changes what the advice is worth.
What genuinely costs nothing
More than people think, and this is the honest good news:
- Learning to build it. Documentation, free courses, and the willingness to be bad at something in public for a long time.
- Version control and code hosting. Free tier, forever, at the scale you are at.
- Hosting, early on. Free tiers on modern platforms will carry a product further than an early-stage product deserves.
- A domain-level marketing site. Static hosting is free. There is no reason for a pre-revenue product to pay for a website.
- Design. You do not need a designer. You need restraint, one typeface, and the discipline to copy the conventions users already know.
What costs money whether you like it or not
| Line item | Why you cannot skip it |
|---|---|
| Domain name | Small, annual, unavoidable. Buy the one you want before you are attached to it. |
| Apple Developer Program | Annual. There is no App Store without it. |
| Google Play developer account | One-time. Cheaper than Apple, still a gate. |
| Business entity and registration | You need it to take payments properly and to sign anything. |
| The database, once you have real users | Free tiers end exactly when things start going right. Budget for it before it happens. |
| Email that sends reliably | Transactional email from a free account fails silently and you will not find out until users do. |
The costs nobody warns you about
Verification takes longer than building
Getting an app approved, getting OAuth verified, getting a security assessment through — none of that is engineering and all of it is waiting, resubmitting, and answering questions from reviewers who cannot see what you can see. Budget months, not weeks, and start it earlier than feels necessary.
Every integration has a tax
Supporting one calendar provider is a feature. Supporting three is a product. Each one has its own auth flow, its own edge cases, its own way of breaking. The second and third cost more than the first, not less.
Compliance pages are not optional
Privacy policy, terms, refund policy, data handling. You cannot ship to an app store without them and you should not want to. This is a weekend of unglamorous work that protects everything else.
What I would do differently
- Start the verification and review processes on day one. Not when the product is ready. They run in parallel with building, and they are the long pole.
- Charge earlier. A free product with enthusiastic users tells you almost nothing. The first person who pays teaches you more than the first hundred who sign up.
- Write the marketing site before the product. If you cannot explain it on one page, the product is not clear enough to build yet.
- Keep the identifiers short. Product IDs, API keys, slugs. Long ones will be rejected by something eventually, and renaming later is worse than choosing well now.
- Stop treating tiredness as strategy. The work that ships is the work you can sustain for two years, not the work you can sprint for six weeks.
The part that is not about money
I came from nothing and I taught myself to do this in my forties, which people bring up like it is the inspiring part. It is not. The useful part is more boring: I did a small amount of it nearly every day for a very long time, including on the days when it was clearly not working.
There is no funding round that substitutes for that, and no lack of one that prevents it.
If you are at the start of this
The costs above are real but they are small. What is expensive is the time, and the only way to protect that is to be honest early about what you are building and who it is for.
Build the smallest true version. Charge for it. Let the people who pay tell you what comes next.
Questions people ask
How much does it cost to build a SaaS product by yourself?
The unavoidable costs are small: a domain, an Apple Developer Program membership annually if you ship to iOS, a one-time Google Play developer account, business registration, and eventually a paid database tier and a reliable transactional email provider once you have real users. Everything else — code hosting, learning, early app hosting, the marketing site and design — can genuinely be done on free tiers.
What is the most underestimated cost of building an app solo?
Time spent on verification and review rather than engineering. App store approval, OAuth verification and any security assessment involve long waits, resubmissions and questions from reviewers. Start those processes on day one rather than when the product feels ready, because they run in parallel with building and they are the longest lead time.
Should I charge for my product before it is finished?
Yes. A free product with enthusiastic users tells you very little about whether the thing is worth building. The first person who actually pays teaches you more about the product than the first hundred signups do.
Do you need investors to build a software product?
No, though it is slower without them. What funding genuinely buys is time and parallelism. Without it you are trading calendar time for capital, which works if what you are building is small enough for one person to hold and you can sustain the pace for years rather than weeks.
Can you learn to build software with no technical background?
Yes. The limiting factor is rarely aptitude — it is whether you can do a small amount of it consistently for a long time, including on the days when it is clearly not working. Consistency beats intensity in this specific pursuit.