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.
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What kind of product are you shipping?
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Estimated year-one outlay
$ 42,180
Range $ 28,360 – $ 69,600. For a solo founder shipping a US SaaS with a home office and light paid distribution.
- Estimated Founder time (1 FTE founder, US small-team founder pay) Mid = $15/hr × 40hr × 52wk. Toggle to opportunity-cost or market-rate.
- $ 31,200
- Included Hosting + SaaS tools (SaaS, US) Vercel + Stripe + GitHub + Linear + Postmark + Sentry on founder tiers.
- $ 2,640
- Included Legal: self-filed Delaware LLC + agent Delaware LLC filing + registered agent (self-filed).
- $ 540
- Included Accounting + bookkeeping software Scales with entity complexity. C-corps typically need bookkeeper hours.
- $ 720
- Included Domain + email + misc infrastructure Domain registration, transactional email, password manager, 1Password team seat.
- $ 280
- Optional Paid distribution (light) Light = under $1,000/mo. Skip to lower the range by ~$6,800.
- $ 6,800
Updated
May 2026
Sourced from
BLS wage data + public SaaS pricingPrintable
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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 May 2026.
Read more from this series
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The five cost categories that show up on every founder's first cloud bill — and which ones you almost certainly underestimate.
Architecture choice
Stack tier explained: managed, serverless, or DIY
Three honest stacks for shipping your first SaaS — what each costs, what each breaks under, how to know which one you're actually building.
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