What will year one actually cost?

A plain-English calculator for solo and 2-3 person founders shipping a real product. Built from public benchmarks, not Twitter folklore.

Tell us about the build

Team size

How many full-time people are on the build today?

Stack

What kind of product are you shipping?

Paid distribution

Search ads, sponsorships, or other paid acquisition?

Office / coworking

Legal & accounting setup

Estimated year-one outlay

$ 42,180

For a solo founder shipping a B2B SaaS in the US with home office and light paid distribution.

Estimated Founder time (1 FTE, US median): $ 31,200
Included Hosting + SaaS tools (Vercel, Stripe, GitHub, etc.): $ 2,640
Included Legal: self-filed Delaware LLC + agent: $ 540
Included Accounting + bookkeeping software: $ 720
Included Domain + email + misc infrastructure: $ 280
Optional Paid distribution (light) Skip to lower the range by ~$6,800.: $ 6,800

Updated

May 2026

Sourced from

BLS wage data + public SaaS pricing

Printable

One-page PDF of your result

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Email is optional, below

Where these numbers come from

Defaults are pulled from Bureau of Labor Statistics median wages for US-based software developers, current public pricing for the thirty most-used founder-stage SaaS tools (Linear, Vercel, Stripe, GitHub, Notion, Postmark, etc.), and three publicly-filed Delaware LLC formations from the past twelve months.

Every assumption is editable — the calculator above is the source of truth, not a fixed model. Last refreshed April 2026.

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