Three budgets, not one

Founders ask 'how much for a SaaS?' the way people ask 'how much for a car?' — the honest answer is three separate purchases. The MVP proves the idea. Version one makes it sellable. The scaling phase keeps it alive when growth arrives. Budgeting for only the first is the classic founder mistake.

Phase 1 — The MVP (EGP 400,000 – 900,000)

A real MVP is not a rough version of everything — it's a polished version of the one thing customers pay for. In Egypt, a focused MVP from a serious team runs EGP 400k–900k over ~90 days: discovery and design (2–3 weeks), core build (8–10 weeks), launch hardening and app-store/release prep.

Where money goes: roughly 25% product design, 55% engineering, 20% DevOps, QA and launch. If a quote is 90% 'coding', design and testing are being improvised — and you'll pay for that later as rework.

The trade-off nobody mentions: an in-house junior team can look 40% cheaper for the MVP, then cost 3× more at v1.0 because the architecture wasn't built to extend. Multi-tenancy, roles and billing are cheap to design in on day one and expensive to bolt on at month nine.

Phase 2 — Sellable v1.0 (EGP 500,000 – 1,500,000)

The gap between 'demo works' and 'customers pay' is where SaaS products are actually made: onboarding that doesn't leak users, billing that handles failed cards gracefully, an admin panel for your team, analytics that tell you what's happening, and the twenty integrations real customers demand. Plan for 4–6 months and a similar budget to the MVP.

Phase 3 — Scaling (EGP 60,000 – 250,000 / month)

This phase is opex, not a project. Expect a combined design/engineering/DevOps retainer of EGP 60k–250k monthly depending on velocity. The work shifts character: performance, security hardening, cost optimization (cloud bills grow faster than revenue if ignored), and feature velocity against competitors.

The scaling trap: infrastructure costs scale with usage whether or not your pricing does. We've inherited SaaS products spending 40% of revenue on cloud because nobody right-sized for two years. Scaling spend should be reviewed quarterly from day one.

How to spend smart

• Pay for discovery before paying for code — a 2–3 week paid discovery saves its cost many times over.

• Ship the MVP to real paying customers, not friends. Friends lie (kindly).

• Instrument everything from day one — you can't improve what you can't see.

• Contract for code ownership explicitly; your Series A will ask.

• Keep one senior architect consistent across phases; rotating architects is silent rework.

The Egyptian advantage

Egyptian engineering rates run 40–60% below EU/US equivalents at comparable quality — which is why our SaaS clients include founders in Germany and the UK. Same math applies to you: building here means more runway per pound.

We build SaaS for founders — and run our own, so the scars are fresh. See how we work or bring us your idea for a phased, fixed-quote roadmap.