“SaaS website” hides two very different projects behind one phrase, and the price gap between them is enormous. Before anyone can quote you honestly, you have to know which one you’re actually buying.
First, split the question in two
A SaaS company usually needs two surfaces:
- The marketing site, the pages that sell the product: home, features, pricing, about, blog. This is a website design project.
- The product, the actual application: dashboards, settings, the thing users log into. This is a product design project, and it’s a different discipline with a different price.
Mixing them into one number is where quotes get confusing. Let’s price them separately.
What the marketing site costs
For a custom-designed SaaS marketing site (not a template), in 2026:
- Template + your content: $500 to $2,000. Fine to validate. You’ll outgrow it.
- Custom marketing site (5 to 8 page types, custom design, CMS, animations): $4,000 to $15,000 from an independent studio; $25,000 to $80,000 from a mid-size agency. The quality overlap between those two brackets is larger than the agencies admit, you’re often paying for account managers, not better pixels. (More on this in our breakdown of custom website cost.)
What moves the number: how many unique page types (not pages, types), whether you need the product’s real UI shown as hero imagery, and how much custom animation and interaction the brand calls for.
What the product design costs
This is the bigger, more variable number, because it scales with the product’s surface area.
- A focused MVP (10 to 20 core screens, one design system, dev-ready): a defined project, typically in the low five figures for design alone.
- A full product (dashboards, settings, flows, empty/loading/error states across dozens of screens): scoped per project, and anyone quoting a flat price before understanding your data model is guessing.
The cost driver here isn’t screen count, it’s states. A single “transactions” screen is really five designs: full, empty, loading, error, and filtered. Good product design prices the states, because that’s where the quality, and the dev-ready handoff , actually lives. You can see what a full SaaS surface looks like in our TaskFlow and FlowMail case studies.
Where SaaS quotes go wrong
- “We’ll design the whole app for $X” before seeing your product. Nobody can. A real process scopes the marketing site as a fixed project and the product in phases.
- Paying for screens that don’t exist yet. Design the core flows first, ship, then expand. Designing forty screens for a product that hasn’t found its shape is money set on fire.
- Skipping the design system. A one-off set of screens is cheaper today and far more expensive the moment you add a feature. A design system is the thing that keeps the tenth screen as consistent as the first.
How to budget it, realistically
Marketing site: treat it as a defined project with a fixed range, get a real number up front. Product: budget for the core first (the screens that prove the value), ship it, and expand in funded phases. That sequencing keeps you from over-designing before real users tell you what actually matters.
Building a SaaS and trying to budget both sides? Tell us what the product does and we’ll give you a range for each surface within a day, we design and build both, so the marketing site and the product speak the same language.
We apply everything above daily in our UI/UX and product design service.