The Real Cost of Running a SaaS: My Monthly Expenses

The cost of running a SaaS comes down to three buckets: infrastructure (server, database and email), the tools around the product, and a fee on every payment. A small product can often keep its fixed infrastructure bill at roughly €30-200 a month, while payment fees and your own maintenance time grow with the business. Below are my own monthly expenses from Remotefitness, the SaaS I built in Denmark, line by line.

These numbers come from a single product, so treat them as a reference point, not a budget. Your bill depends on customer count, data volume and the tools you pick. [PLACEHOLDER: which period the numbers cover, e.g. monthly average for a given year, whether they exclude VAT, and whether Remotefitness is still running (if not, the post needs past tense)]

The short answer: my monthly bill

If you want the story of how the product itself was built, read from idea to SaaS: choices and priorities. This post is only about the bill for keeping it running.

Fixed costs: server, database and email

Every SaaS needs somewhere to run the code, a database and a reliable way to send email. For most small products, all of it fits on a single server at first. My usual recommendation is one server in an EU region plus a management tool on top, which keeps both the bill and the operational work small. For European B2B customers, EU hosting also makes the GDPR conversation shorter.

Laravel Forge costs $12, $19 or $39 a month depending on the plan. That covers server management: provisioning, zero-downtime deploys and monitoring. You pay for the server itself separately, either to a provider such as Hetzner or DigitalOcean, or through Laravel's own VPS. Backups usually cost extra, and they're one of the few places I never cut corners. Test a restore at least once, too.

Transactional email should go through a service built for it, so receipts and password resets don't end up in spam. Postmark has a free plan with 100 emails a month, and its cheapest paid plan is $15 for 10,000 emails.

[PLACEHOLDER: which hosting, server management and email service Remotefitness uses, what each costs in EUR, and why Simon chose that setup]

For a detailed comparison of Laravel Cloud, Forge, Vercel and AWS, see my guide to SaaS hosting options for European products.

Payment fees: the cost that scales with revenue

Infrastructure is a fixed cost. Payment fees are a percentage of everything you sell, which is why they often become the largest line item once the product starts earning.

Taking Ireland as a eurozone example, Stripe's standard pricing is 1.5% + €0.25 for a standard EEA card, 2.8% + €0.25 for premium EEA cards, 2.5% + €0.25 for UK cards and 3.15% + €0.25 for international cards. If you use Stripe Billing for subscriptions on the pay-as-you-go plan, add 0.7% of billing volume. Check the pricing page for your own country before you budget.

Paddle charges 5% + $0.50 per transaction. That's more, but Paddle acts as merchant of record: it is legally the seller to your customer and takes care of sales tax and VAT in the customer's country.

Here's what a €29 monthly subscription costs in fees, paid with a standard EEA card:

Fixed fees hurt small payments most. On a €9 plan, Stripe's €0.25 fixed fee alone is almost 3%. That's a good argument for offering annual billing: one fixed fee instead of twelve.

[PLACEHOLDER: which payment provider Remotefitness uses and what share of revenue went to fees in a typical month. Only if Simon wants to share it.]

The tools around the product

Beyond the app itself, a SaaS relies on a handful of tools to keep an eye on things and run the business. Most have free tiers that last a while:

• Error tracking, so you hear about bugs before customers email you. Sentry has a free plan for one user, and its Team plan is $26 a month billed annually.
• Uptime monitoring that pings your site and alerts you when it stops responding. Several services offer free plans for a small number of checks.
• Accounting software, which you're probably paying for already if you run a company.
• Support. A shared inbox is plenty at first, and a helpdesk tool can wait until volume demands it.

The tooling bill tends to creep up because each subscription is cheap on its own. Five tools at €15 each add up to €900 a year.

[PLACEHOLDER: Simon's actual list of operational tools for Remotefitness, with monthly price in EUR and whether each is on a free or paid plan]

The tools I use for day-to-day development work are in my list of 25 freelance developer tools.

The line item nobody invoices: maintenance time

The biggest cost rarely shows up on an invoice. It's the hours spent on updates, security patches, support and small bugs. Even a SaaS with no new features needs maintenance: the framework ships new versions, packages get security fixes, and the server needs patching.

If you're a developer yourself, you pay in time instead of money. If you hire a developer or a contractor, it becomes a fixed monthly cost. Either way, it belongs in the budget.

[PLACEHOLDER: roughly how many hours a month Simon spends running Remotefitness, split between updates, support and bug fixes]

[PLACEHOLDER: which cost, in money or time, surprised Simon most after launch, and what he did about it]

I've collected the mistakes I made along the way in 10 pitfalls in SaaS development.

How I'd keep running costs low

Most running costs are decided while the product is being built. These are the choices I recommend:

1. Start on one server in an EU region and upgrade when your metrics show a need, not before.
2. Stay on free tiers for error tracking and email until you hit the limits.
3. Pick a payment provider based on who your customers are. If you sell to businesses, Stripe is usually the cheaper option. If you sell to consumers across the EU, Paddle's higher fee can be worth it to avoid the VAT paperwork.
4. Offer annual billing. You pay fewer fixed fees and get cash in earlier.
5. Set a billing alert with your hosting provider, especially on usage-based pricing.
6. Review your subscriptions every quarter and cancel anything you haven't opened.
7. Build with operations in mind: heavy work in background queues, caching where it matters, and automated dependency updates. It's cheaper to do from the start than to retrofit.

[PLACEHOLDER: whether Simon has cancelled a tool or switched provider for Remotefitness to save money, and what changed]

When cheap is the wrong goal

It's easy to spend too much time saving €15 a month. If a managed platform costs a bit more but saves you one hour of server work a month, it's the cheaper option in practice. The same goes for backups and error tracking: one night of downtime can cost more than a year of subscriptions.

And to be honest: if your SaaS is small and the bill is low, you don't need a developer like me to optimize it. Your time is better spent on sales. Customers are the hard part, which is what the post on getting your first paying SaaS customers covers. I'm most useful when a product needs to be built, rebuilt or scaled, while the infrastructure decisions are still cheap to change.

Next steps

Build your own version of the table above. List every line item, put a number on it and add a percentage for payment fees. Then add your own maintenance hours, even if nobody invoices them. That gives you a running-cost budget you can trust.

If you haven't built the product yet, here's how I approach SaaS development for European startups and businesses. Larger projects start with a paid, fixed-price discovery phase, so the running-cost budget is part of the plan from the beginning. To see what the first version looks like in practice, read about my MVP development process, week by week.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to run a SaaS before it has paying customers?+

Usually very little. With no customers there are no payment fees, and email and error tracking can run on free plans. What's left is typically a server, a management tool and a domain, which for a small product can often come in under €50 a month. The real cost at that stage is your own time spent building and maintaining it.

Do running costs grow with the number of customers?+

Only some of them. Payment fees grow directly with revenue, and usage-based services such as email or AI features grow with activity. A single server can often handle a fair number of customers before it needs an upgrade, especially in a B2B SaaS with relatively few users. Keep the closest eye on anything billed per seat or per unit of usage.

Does a European SaaS need EU hosting?+

Not strictly, but it makes life easier. Under GDPR, transferring personal data outside the EU requires a valid transfer mechanism, such as an adequacy decision or standard contractual clauses, and B2B buyers in Europe may ask where data is stored during procurement. An EU region at a major provider is usually enough. If you handle sensitive data, get advice from a privacy lawyer before you choose.

How much should I budget for code maintenance?+

Set aside a fixed number of hours each month rather than waiting for something to break. How many depends on the size of the app, the number of integrations and how outdated the dependencies are. Small, regular updates are almost always cheaper than one big upgrade every two years, because each update is small enough to test properly.