Running a multi-product SaaS business solo costs €77–€230 a month — roughly €1,560–€2,760 a year. That's my actual bill for FIKR Space: 11 integrated software products, no team, no investors, no office. Just me, a laptop, and a handful of tools that cost less than your car insurance.
Everyone talks about the cost of building a software business — I've broken that one down in how much it costs to build a SaaS. This is the question nobody answers: what it costs to run one, month after month, once it's live and serving customers. No hypotheticals. No "it depends." Actual numbers.
The full monthly stack
Three groups: the AI that does the heavy lifting, the infrastructure that keeps your product running, and the business operations you already understand from your day job.
| Tool | What it actually does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Cursor Pro | An editor where you describe what you want in plain English and AI writes the code | €20/mo |
| Claude Pro | An AI thinking partner that helps you plan, write, and fix everything | €20/mo |
| GitHub | Safely stores every version of your work — track changes for software | €0 |
| Supabase Pro | Data, user accounts, files — your product's entire back office in one place | €25/mo |
| Vercel | Puts your product on the internet, fast, everywhere — no servers to manage | €0–20/mo |
| Domain names | Your business address on the web | ~€5/mo |
| Google Workspace | Professional email and documents | €7/mo |
| Stripe | Accepts payments from customers worldwide | 2.9% per transaction |
| MailerLite | Email newsletters and marketing campaigns | €0–10/mo |
| PostHog / Plausible | Who's using your product, what they click, where they drop off | €0–15/mo |
| Canva | Graphics and marketing materials | €0–12/mo |
| Total | Minimum ~€77/mo · typical €130–€230/mo | ~€1,560–€2,760/yr |
That's it. That's what it costs to run a multi-product software business in 2026 — less than what most people spend on takeaway coffee. And none of it requires a computer science degree to set up.
How SaaS running costs scale with users
Here's what most people get wrong about SaaS costs: they don't scale the way you think.
- 0–100 monthly active users: €0 — free tiers handle everything
- 100–1,000 users: €0–€25 — still mostly free
- 1,000–10,000 users: €25–€70 — pro tiers kick in
- 10,000–50,000 users: €70–€250 — real scaling costs begin
- 50,000–100,000 users: €250–€830 — still manageable solo
Read that carefully. You can serve 10,000 users for under €70 a month. In 2019, serving 10,000 users required infrastructure costing €500–€2,000 a month, plus a dedicated specialist to keep everything running. What used to require a €50,000-a-year infrastructure team now comes out of the box, ready to go, for the price of a meal out.
What a corporate team costs to do the same job
Let me put this in corporate terms. I've spent years inside companies; I've seen the budgets — and if you've been in corporate long enough, so have you. A team building and running what I run solo looks like this: five full-stack developers (€400,000–€600,000 a year), two UI/UX designers (€100,000–€160,000), a product manager (€80,000–€120,000), a QA engineer (€60,000–€80,000), a DevOps engineer (€70,000–€100,000), cloud infrastructure (€24,000–€60,000), plus office, tools, and overhead (€50,000–€100,000). Total: €784,000–€1,220,000 per year.
My cost? €2,760 a year, max. That's 0.2% to 0.35% of the traditional cost. I'm not saying my output is identical to a 10-person team — it isn't. But it's 80% of the way there for 0.3% of the cost, and for a solo founder testing whether an idea works, 80% is more than enough. The full math of why one focused person keeps pace with ten is in why one person can out-build a team.
The revenue side: 90%+ margins
The sweet spot for solo software founders is €5,000–€50,000 MRR — monthly recurring revenue, money that comes in every single month automatically. That's €60,000–€600,000 a year. At these numbers, bootstrapped software businesses typically achieve 70–90% profit margins, because the costs above are so absurdly low.
Let me make it simple: 100 customers at €49 a month is €4,900 MRR — €58,800 a year. Operating cost: €2,760 a year. Profit: €56,040, a 95% margin. You don't need 10,000 customers or a viral launch; you need 100 people who value what you built enough to pay €49 a month — the whole model is in the 100 customers model. And you probably already know those people: they're in your industry, they share your frustrations, and they'd pay for a tool that solves the problem you've been complaining about in meetings for years. Once revenue starts, track it properly — these are the SaaS metrics that matter.
The costs that don't show up in the spreadsheet
Your time. The most expensive line item is the hours you invest. Building while employed means trading evenings and weekends; building after quitting means trading salary certainty. Neither is free.
The learning curve. AI does the technical heavy lifting, but you still need to understand what you're building and why. The good news: your years of domain expertise — understanding the problem, knowing the customer, seeing the gaps — are the hardest skills to acquire. The technical part is now the easy part. The first 3 months are the steepest; it gets dramatically better after that.
Marketing. The tools to build are cheap. The skills to sell are priceless. Budget time for learning distribution — though if you come from business, marketing, or operations, you already have more of these skills than most developers ever will.
The tools are the easy part. You are the expensive part. But you're also the part that appreciates in value — and your non-technical background is not the handicap you think it is. It's the advantage most technical founders wish they had.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to run a SaaS solo per month?
With free tiers maxed, about €77 a month. A typical operating cost is €130–€230 a month — €1,560–€2,760 a year — covering AI building tools, infrastructure, payments, email, and analytics for a multi-product business.
What's the difference between the cost to build and the cost to run?
Build cost is the one-off push to get from idea to a live product — tools plus your evenings for around eight weeks. Running cost is the recurring monthly bill once real users are on it: infrastructure, payments, email, analytics. This post covers the second; the build side has its own breakdown.
How do infrastructure costs grow with users?
Slower than you'd think. Free tiers carry you to about 1,000 users. At 10,000 users you're under €70 a month. Even at 50,000–100,000 users you're looking at €250–€830 a month — still manageable for one person.
What profit margin can a solo SaaS founder expect?
Bootstrapped software businesses typically run 70–90% margins. In my worked example — 100 customers at €49 a month against €2,760 a year in costs — the margin is 95%. Software is the rare business where the bill barely moves as revenue grows.