SaaS Product Development: Fundamentals, Costs, and Beyond
/Written by: Yuliya Melnik
The Art of Balancing Functionality and Affordability in SaaS Product Development
SaaS is one of the booming markets due to the success of GitHub, Slack, Zoom, and HubSpot-like platforms. Hence, businesses in all industries try to figure out how they can make their SaaS app profitable and successful. The following post will refer to the market perspective of SaaS, the value it may bring to businesses, and the cost of delivering a SaaS offer.
Why SaaS Products Are the Future of Your Business
SaaS is a cloud-based solution that allows users to access software through the Internet without installing it on their device. A software service can be free and available to use on your browser. At the same time, it may have a “payment wall” that requires subscribing to it to enjoy certain benefits.
Experts claim that the revenue for SaaS applications will grow enormously. According to Statista, the SaaS revenue will reach $253.90 billion by the end of 2023 and will ultimately rise to $344 billion by 2027.
There is a great variety of companies providing their SaaS offer to enhance the workflow. The most popular services are:
Google offers a whole set of SaaS services, including Google Ads, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, and Google Docs.
Adobe is one of the pioneers in providing multiple SaaS solutions. The most prominent are Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud, among others.
Slack is a super-efficient and successful team collaboration and communication tool that excels its competition both in size and level of services provided. It can be used either on browser or its app, installed instead of the locally-run business communication tools.
The Benefits of Making a SaaS Product in Any Industry
It doesn’t matter in which industry area you are working while planning to develop a SaaS product. Producing your SaaS application might bring many advantages:
Affordability
When companies are looking for affordable solutions, they often select SaaS app development. Such offers allow starting a project without substantial upfront fees and avoiding investments in costly hardware, additional staff, and operational costs like security and infrastructure management. Besides, when developing a SaaS solution, it’s easier to plan a budget because the users pay a fixed monthly or annual fee. SaaS providers usually declare their pricing policy transparent, helping customers not get any surprise fees and situations.
Rapid deployment
Smooth product deployment is a well-known and effective technique that lets users access the product beforehand and get an opportunity to voice their opinions. Creating a Software-as-a-Service solution can significantly speed up the ROI, verify the idea, and help companies start making profits faster, unlike traditional engineering methods. Swift product deployment allows businesses to gain good market standing and become a pioneer to gain a competitive advantage.
Auto updates
If you want to create minimal maintenance but fully functional software, consider developing a SaaS application. The program is updated automatically, meaning it will always remain up-to-date and secure. Besides, you will not need to update the platform manually, saving your time for priority and other important tasks.
Scalability
When developing a SaaS platform, consider how the program will spread and what is the size and volume of data it will support. Cloud solutions are powerful and can hold colossal data. Moreover, it converts unavailable resources and offers the highest degree of customization.
Additionally, you should pay attention to the fact that most software contains APIs . It means that you can easily integrate other programs and create one efficient and value-added solution.
Compatibility with any device
The platforms have the advantage of being available on any device , such as smartphones and tablets. They are also very user-friendly, which is already a heavy advantage . However, keep in mind that for the software to work, you need to have a good and stable Internet connection.
To ensure that SaaS products remain relevant, it may be helpful to have a way to generate money from them in mind. The graphic below depicts the most popular services for monetizing your SaaS product.
The Cost of Creating a SaaS Product
Creating a SaaS product can be expensive. How expensive – it depends on the complexity of the operations the product will perform, the type of SaaS, the technology used, as well as the cooperation model. The expense may range from $50,000 to $300,000 or more. There are ways to save on SaaS development costs.
When creating a software product, consider the following ways to make the cost and development process more predictable:
Start with the most important functionalities and avoid all additional options. This will allow you to experiment and later develop additional features;
Leave the software product development to an external team of experts. With this collaboration model, the cost of developing an in-house team is cut by external contractors;
Choose a technology relevant to the task ahead. Popular solutions are usually best as they are widely tested and supported, with no problems finding information and an adequate solution. There are many resources and professionals on the market using these tools;
Ensure that your product is secure and that from the very beginning you comply with the relevant policies and regulations. You’ll need to pay a little extra, but it’ll save you a big financial loss down the road.
Conclusion
The averaging SaaS development process is a prevalent problem for a large number of companies from various domains. Although technological scalability, cost reduction, and the faster time-to-market are great advantages, there are a number of complicated and debatable questions. Functionality and cost-effectiveness should be counterweighted in the market strategy, so a business should follow a particular development system to make their product powerful, but affordable at the same time.
The use of MVP and outsourcing for the creation of SaaS can help a great deal. Regulatory compliance and proper security should be taken seriously, especially for the SaaS case, where a number of operational activities are not handled by a company. A combined usage of such factors allows a great number of companies to take advantage of SaaS, and, thus, becomes successful and sustainable.
In case you need help with an effective development of a SaaS product, it is a good choice to entrust this service to a dedicated software development vendor. Look for a company that specializes in providing SaaS and guide you through the process and help you with an emerging tech problem.
Author bio
Yuliya Melnik is a technical writer at Cleveroad, a software development company in Ukraine. She is passionate about innovative technologies that make the world a better place and loves creating content that evokes vivid emotions.