SaaS costs are not just about development When people estimate SaaS costs, the conversation usually starts with: developer pricing frameworks hosting feature lists But in practice, the biggest costs often come from operational complexity. As products grow, expenses start appearing in: integrations infrastructure onboarding security maintenance customer support scaling workflows Building is faster now AI-assisted development and modern tooling have reduced the speed required to build software. Shipping products is becoming easier. But reliability, usability, and maintainability are still difficult. The challenge is no longer just writing code. The challenge is managing complexity over time. Early architecture decisions matter A lot of startups optimize for speed in the beginning. That makes sense early on. But weak architecture decisions eventually create: scaling problems technical debt integration issues expensive rebuild cycles Many teams end up rebuilding major parts of their backend later.…