For a first version of a SaaS product, the honest range is roughly $25,000 to $80,000 and eight to sixteen weeks. Almost all of that spread comes from three things: how many user roles the product has, whether billing has to work on day one, and how much of the workflow needs to happen in real time.
The habit that doubles budgets is not ambition, it is vagueness. A line item called "user dashboard" can mean four screens or forty. Before asking anyone for a number, write every screen on a single page. If the list does not fit, the first version is too big, so cut until it does. Version one needs one moment where the product proves itself, not feature parity with a competitor who has had five years.
Spend where it compounds, which means the data model, authentication and the deployment pipeline. Be boring everywhere else. Boring technology ships, and shipping is the only validation that counts.
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