SaaS development in Malta and EuropeBuilding it is six months.Finding out if anyone wants it is six weeks.
SaaS product building is an application plus everything that makes it a business: separate tenants that cannot see each other, subscription billing and trials, self-serve sign-up and onboarding, and the usage metrics that tell you which parts are used and which were a guess. Shipped as a first version, then iterated against real accounts.
What does it take to build a SaaS product?
A SaaS product is an application plus everything that makes it a business: tenants isolated from each other, subscription billing and trials, self-serve sign-up and onboarding, and usage metrics. Drasyo ships a deliberately narrow first version with billing wired from day one, then iterates weekly against what real accounts actually do.
The first version does one job better than the spreadsheet it replaces: one plan, one way through. A product with four half-finished features tells you nothing about demand; a narrow one that people pay for tells you what to build next.
Billing states are decided before the first screen: a lapsed trial, a card that failed on the third retry, seats added mid-month, a downgrade that must remove exactly the right features. Retrofitting that into a product with paying accounts means migrating money.
The first version is a fixed-price phase quoted after scoping, and continued iteration is bought monthly. Card details never touch the application, tenant data is isolated at the database layer, and GDPR export and deletion are built in.
This page answers:
- How much does it cost to build a SaaS product?
- Can you build my SaaS MVP before I have funding?
- Should I hire an agency or find a technical co-founder?
Why it matters
A first version exists to answer one question: will someone pay for this. Everything that does not help answer it is a cost with no information attached.
Billing is not a later problem
Trials, failed cards, mid-month seats and downgrades are decided before the first screen. Retrofitting them into a product with paying accounts means migrating money.
Tenants separated at the database
Isolation is a constraint in the schema, not a filter someone must remember to add. The leak that ends a SaaS is one missing WHERE clause.
Instrumented, so the roadmap can be wrong
Activation, usage and churn are measured where they happen. The next decision comes from what accounts did, not from what the pitch deck assumed.
The part founders underestimate
The application is rarely the hard part. Billing states are: a trial that lapsed, a card that failed on the third retry, a team that added four seats mid-month, an account that downgraded and must lose exactly the right features and no others.
That logic is decided before the first screen is built, because retrofitting it into a product that already has paying accounts means migrating money. Get it right once and the rest of the product is free to change weekly.
The full list is in what a first SaaS version should include.
See pricing for how engagements are scoped and what a phase includes.
How we do it
How a SaaS product gets built.
- Narrow
- First version
- Billing
- Instrument
- Iterate
Narrow
One job the product does better than the spreadsheet it replaces. Everything else waits for evidence.
First version
The smallest thing a real account can sign up for and use, with billing wired from day one.
Instrument
Activation, usage and churn measured where they happen, so the next decision has something behind it.
Iterate
Weekly releases against what accounts actually do, with the roadmap re-cut when the data disagrees with it.
Built with
What our SaaS products are built with.
Interface
TypeScript
One language from the database call to the button, with the types checked at the boundary between them.
React
For interfaces with state worth managing — anything signed in, live or multi-step.
Tailwind CSS
A spacing and colour scale that holds across a large application without a stylesheet nobody dares delete from.
Application
Next.js
Server rendering, routing and server-side data access in one framework, so permissions are checked on the server.
Node.js
The runtime everything else assumes, and the same language the interface is written in.
Stripe
Subscriptions, trials and failed-payment handling. Card details never reach the application.
Data
PostgreSQL
Relational, boring and correct. Tenant isolation and constraints belong here rather than in application code.
Prisma
Schema as a file in the repository, with migrations reviewed like any other change.
Redis
Sessions, rate limits and job queues — the state that should disappear cleanly if it is lost.
Delivery
GitHub Actions
Tests, type checks and the performance and accessibility gates run on every push, not before a launch.
Playwright
The handful of journeys that must never break — sign-up, checkout, enquiry — tested in a real browser.
Docker
The same environment locally and in production, so "it works on my machine" stops being a category of bug.
Cloudflare
Edge caching, DNS and protection in front of everything we host.
Agents and workflows
Claude and GPT APIs
Model calls for classification, drafting and qualification, always behind our own validation.
Vector search
Retrieval over your own documents, so an agent answers from your content instead of its training data.
SaaS Development in Malta and Europe FAQs
SaaS development questionsThe ones we get asked.
How much does it cost to build a SaaS product?
It depends on how narrow the first version is, which is the main lever on cost. Drasyo quotes the first version as a fixed-price phase after scoping, so the cost is known before it starts, and continued iteration is bought monthly and can stop whenever it stops paying for itself.
Can you build my SaaS MVP before I have funding?
That is the usual case. The first version is deliberately narrow: one job, one plan, one way through it, because a product with four half-finished features tells you nothing about demand. It is bought as a fixed-price phase, so the cost is known before it starts.
Should I hire an agency or find a technical co-founder?
A co-founder shares the risk and owns part of the company; an agency is a supplier you pay and can replace. Drasyo works for fees only, never equity, and you own the repository and infrastructure accounts, so hiring your own engineers later is a handover, not a negotiation.
Who runs my SaaS product after launch?
Whoever you want. Some clients take the codebase and hire in-house once there is revenue to justify it; others keep us on a monthly engagement for releases and upkeep. The handover is the same either way: your repository, your infrastructure accounts, written documentation.
What does multi-tenant mean in a SaaS product?
It means many customer accounts share one application while each account's data stays separate and invisible to the others. In a Drasyo build that isolation is enforced at the database layer by default, rather than checked screen by screen, so one missed check cannot expose a customer's data to another.
How does a SaaS product handle payments and GDPR?
Card details never touch the application: payment is handled by a PCI-compliant provider and the product stores only the subscription state. Tenant data is isolated at the database layer, backups are tested rather than assumed, and GDPR export and deletion are built rather than promised.
Start with saas product building?
Tell us what you are trying to grow. We reply with what we would change first.