Budget planning for founders sizing a build. What things actually cost in 2026, across hires, agencies, freelancers, and Cadence weekly bookings.
Adding AI summarization to your SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$2,000 to $150,000+ in one-time engineering**, plus **$20 to $5,000 per month in token spend** depending on volume. A "summarize this" bu
Building a Microsoft Teams app in 2026 typically costs **$8,000 to $200,000+** depending on scope. A simple notification bot lands at $8,000 to $20,000, a full-featured app with tabs and messaging ext
Building a Calendly clone in 2026 costs **$8,000 to $400,000+** depending on what you actually need. A basic booking page with a single calendar sync and email confirmations lands at **$8k to $20k**.
Adding user analytics to your SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$0 to $1,000+ per month for hosted tools** (PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude), or **$3,000 to $60,000 in one-time engineering** if you build it
Building an accounting SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$120,000 to $2,500,000+** depending on which tier of the market you target. A QuickBooks-Self-Employed-class micro-business tool lands at $120k to
Migrating from Heroku to Render in 2026 typically costs **$3,000 to $12,000 in engineer time** for a small or medium app, and **$20,000 to $50,000** for complex apps with many addons, custom buildpack
Adding semantic search to your SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$10,000 to $120,000 in one-time engineering**, plus **$50 to $4,000/month in infrastructure**. A bare MVP (OpenAI embeddings, pgvector, no
Adding a referral program to your app in 2026 typically costs **$50 to $500 per month for a hosted SaaS**, or **$15,000 to $45,000 in one-time engineering** for a custom build. Most early-stage teams
Building a custom HubSpot integration in 2026 typically costs **$4,000 to $150,000+** depending on scope. A simple one-way sync (a form submission creates a HubSpot contact and updates two properties)
Adding WCAG 2.2 AA compliance to a typical SaaS in 2026 costs **$8,000 to $150,000+** depending on what you ship. A small marketing site runs **$8,000 to $25,000**. A mid-size SaaS app with dashboards
Migrating a Next.js app from the Pages Router to the App Router in 2026 typically costs **$8,000 to $250,000** in engineering time, depending on app size. A small app under 30 routes lands in the **$8
Building a customer portal in 2026 typically costs **$15,000 to $500,000+** depending on what it does. A read-only portal (orders, invoices, downloads) runs **$15k to $40k**. A transactional portal (m
Adding SSO to your SaaS app in 2026 costs **$25 to $500 per month per customer connection** if you buy (WorkOS, Clerk, Auth0), or **$30,000 to $60,000 upfront plus $5,000 to $15,000 per year in mainte
Building an insurance platform in 2026 typically costs **$80,000 to $2,000,000+** depending on what "insurance platform" means in your case. A broker portal that sells third-party policies sits at $80
Rewriting a legacy application in 2026 typically costs **$80,000 to $3,000,000+**, almost entirely driven by codebase size and hidden business logic. A small internal tool under 50,000 lines of code l
Building an event management platform in 2026 typically costs **$30,000 to $1.5 million** depending on scope. A ticketing-only Eventbrite clone runs $30k to $80k. A full conference platform with check
Building a project management tool in 2026 typically costs **$30,000 to $2,000,000+** depending on scope. A Trello-style kanban clone for an internal team runs $30k to $60k. An Asana-class multi-proje
Migrating from PHP to Node.js in 2026 typically costs **$40,000 to $500,000** depending on the pattern you choose. A small API-only re-platform runs $40k to $150k, a route-by-route strangler-fig migra
Building a Chrome extension in 2026 typically costs **$3,000 to $80,000+** in engineer time, depending on scope. A simple content-script plus popup ships for $3k to $8k. A medium extension with backen
Building an admin dashboard in 2026 typically costs **$2,000 to $40,000** depending on scope. A simple CRUD panel (users, content, basic reporting) ships in 1-2 weeks at $1,000-$2,000 with one AI-nati
Building a podcast platform like Spotify in 2026 typically costs **$15,000 to $80,000** if you mean a true podcast-only app (RSS-based, no music licensing), or **$500,000 to $2,000,000+** if you actua
Building a Shopify app in 2026 typically costs **$5,000 to $300,000+** depending on scope. A private app for one merchant lands at **$5,000 to $15,000**. A public utility app for the App Store runs **
--- title: "Cost to build a Next.js application end-to-end in 2026" slug: "cost-to-build-nextjs-application" metaDescription: "Real 2026 cost to build a Next.js application end-to-end: design, MVP, ho
Building a Figma plugin in 2026 typically costs **$3,000 to $150,000+** depending on scope. A simple utility plugin (one file edit, no UI state) lands at $3,000 to $10,000. A design-system tool with t
Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL in 2026 typically costs **$2,000 to $24,000 in engineer time** depending on database size and application coupling. A sub-100GB database with a clean ORM costs 2 to
Building a Google Workspace add-on in 2026 typically costs **$5,000 to $150,000+** depending on scope. A simple Apps Script utility for your own domain runs $5,000 to $15,000. A custom-UI add-on with
Adding image generation to your app in 2026 typically costs **$1,500 to $10,000 in one-time engineering**, plus **$0.003 to $0.20 per image** at runtime. A basic Replicate or fal wire-up takes 1 to 2
Building a content management system from scratch in 2026 typically costs **$20,000 to $250,000+** to ship a real V1. The honest answer for 95% of teams: don't build one. Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, P
Building a custom Salesforce integration in 2026 typically costs **$5,000 to $250,000**, depending on direction, latency, and whether you ship to AppExchange. A one-way nightly sync runs $5k to $15k.
Building a public API for your SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$20,000 to $250,000+** to ship a real V1. The cheap end is API keys plus hardened endpoints. The expensive end is a Stripe-grade surface w
Integrating the Claude API into your app costs **$1,500 to $7,500** in engineer time for the build, plus a monthly token bill from **$20 for a low-volume internal tool to $4,000+ for a public consumer
Adding internationalization (i18n) to a web app in 2026 typically costs **$4,000 to $60,000** in engineering, plus **$50 to $1,500 per month** in translation tooling. A small greenfield app ships in 1
Adding SOC 2 compliance to a SaaS in 2026 typically costs **$30,000 to $120,000** in year one, depending on which scope tier you pick. The biggest line items are a compliance platform ($5k-$40k/year),
Building a property management app in 2026 typically costs **$20,000 to $250,000+** to ship a real V1, with most legitimate custom builds landing between **$80,000 and $180,000**. But the honest answe
Building an IoT platform in 2026 typically costs **$80,000 to $1,000,000+** to ship a real V1. A single-product device fleet runs $80k to $200k. A multi-tenant platform that hosts other companies' dev
Building a workflow automation tool in 2026 typically costs **$40,000 to $500,000+**, depending on scope. A vertical-specific automation tool runs $40k to $100k. A general n8n-style clone runs $150k t
Building a B2C e-learning platform in 2026 typically costs **$25,000 to $400,000+** to ship a real V1, depending on scope. A single-creator Teachable-style site lands around $25k to $60k. A multi-crea
Adding transcription to a video or audio app costs **$500 to $30,000 in engineer time**, plus **$0.0025 to $0.0077 per minute of audio** in API fees. The exact number depends on whether you ship batch
Adding voice AI to a customer-facing product in 2026 typically costs **$5,000 to $90,000 in engineering time**, plus **$0.08 to $0.31 per minute** of runtime. The build range depends entirely on scope
Building a custom document management system in 2026 typically costs **$25,000 to $250,000+** to ship a real V1. Internal tools land at $25k-$60k, vertical SaaS DMS products run $80k-$180k, and compli
Building a custom WordPress plugin in 2026 typically costs **$1,500 to $150,000+**, depending on complexity. A simple shortcode plugin runs $1,500 to $4,000. A standard custom-post-type plugin with an
Migrating from Firebase to Supabase in 2026 typically costs **$8,000 to $60,000** in engineer-weeks for a real production app, plus a one-time platform overlap of $50 to $500 while both stacks run in
The cost to integrate Stripe into your app in 2026 typically runs **$500 to $20,000** in engineering time. A one-time checkout takes about 1 engineer-week. Subscription billing with webhooks runs 2 to
Building a healthcare app in 2026 typically costs **$40,000 to $400,000** to ship a real V1, depending on which sub-category (patient, provider, payer, pharma), your FDA SaMD risk class, and how you s
Building a restaurant ordering system in 2026 typically costs **$15,000 to $250,000** for a real V1, depending on whether you ship a single-restaurant ordering page, a multi-location chain platform, o
Adding RAG to a SaaS app in 2026 typically costs **$8,000 to $100,000** in build cost, plus **$50 to $5,000 per month** in infrastructure. The cheap end is a basic Q&A bot over your docs (6 to 10 engi
Migrating from Heroku to AWS in 2026 typically costs **$8,000 to $40,000** in engineer-weeks, plus a $400 to $4,000 monthly AWS bill afterwards. Plan for 4 to 12 engineer-weeks of focused work to ship
Building a recruiting platform in 2026 typically costs **$40,000 to $250,000+** to ship a real V1, depending on whether you go vertical-niche, general ATS, or enterprise multi-tenant. The biggest driv
--- title: "Cost to add AI recommendations to your platform in 2026" slug: "cost-to-add-ai-recommendations" metaDescription: "The cost to add AI recommendations runs $5,000 to $120,000 in 2026. Build
Fine-tuning an LLM in 2026 typically costs **$5,000 to $50,000+ as a real project**, not the $20 to $1,000 GPU bill most calculators show. The compute is the cheap part. Engineer-weeks for data prep,