Building your own Software As A Service (SaaS) product is not an easy decision. The rewards of having your own SaaS product that is generating monthly revenue for you are attractive. SaaS applications have made a fundamental shift in the way that software is delivered and purchased.

A recent report from UBS Wealth Management estimates that the subscription economy will double in the next 5 years to 1.5 Trillion by 2025.

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Third Wave Technology has been developing SaaS applications for its clients for over 10 years now and one of the biggest decisions for clients is whether to build their own SaaS product. And of course, the answer is, it depends.

There are a lot of factors involved in making the decision of whether to build your own custom SaaS product. Depending on the complexity of the product building a SaaS product can be expensive. After all, modern SaaS products demand basic features such as automated signup, instant access, credit card, and billing management, Authentication, Security, Authorization to possibly support different tiers of access, notifications, data storage, and management, scalability, availability, possible integrations with third-party services, help systems, onboarding, possible data import/export and a whole lot more.

This can make the development process expensive to build, even when utilizing third-party tools to accelerate and ease the development. There are also ongoing costs for maintenance, new features, and support. Finally, there are the ongoing costs of hosting the software in the cloud and any monthly vendor service costs.

There is always the option of using a no-code solution to build your own solution using a platform such as Kintone. This can be a great option for proving out your idea or for less complex projects. As with any tool or platform, there is a learning curve, and it’s the degree of customization that is the major factor in determining whether it makes sense to go this road. I like to apply the 80/20 rule here. If you have to customize more than 20% from what the platform offers you should consider a custom build option.

Using a no-code platform can turn into a custom effort once you start exceeding the 20% threshold. Otherwise, you should be able to live with some of the compromises you will accept from the platform. It’s all about tradeoffs.

However, in the lean world of getting your product to market time is valuable. The least expensive and fastest way to prove out your idea and validate your market is the most important factor of all.

This assumes you have done your homework and know the target market and your product-market fit and value proposition. That’s no different than any other product or business.

In the end, that is how we help our clients is to help you decide on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that will prove your product-market fit and value proposition. From there, the decision on how to move forward with your SaaS idea becomes much clearer.

If you have a SaaS idea, feel free to reach out. We help guide business ideas on a regular basis and can save you a lot of pain.