I Thought Low Pricing Would Be My Startup’s Advantage — Turns Out It Doesn’t Work That Way

Hi everyone! 👋

My name is Serhii. I’m a .NET developer with 6+ years of experience and the founder of TaskJect (https://taskject.com) — a lightweight project-management tool built for small technical teams.

Here on Dev.to I’ll be sharing the technical journey behind building TaskJect, lessons from running a small SaaS as a solo founder, and practical insights from real .NET development in production.

Today, I want to talk about low pricing of SaaS services.

How Is the Price Actually Formed?

I keep asking myself this from time to time — especially when I look for a new tool and the price instantly turns me away.

When I started building my own product, I set a goal to define a “minimum acceptable price” for users.

Here’s what I mean by that as a technical specialist:

The Core Components of the Minimum SaaS Cost

Infrastructure

You need to calculate exactly how many hardware resources one user consumes:

servers, storage, databases, backups, monitoring — all of this forms the baseline cost.

Technical Maintenance

You need at least one engineer who will:

• handle system errors,
• maintain stability,
• ensure uptime, updates, and security.

Technically, that’s all you need for a stable SaaS.

So in theory, the final price could be quite low.

But Here’s the Reality: Why “Cheap SaaS” Becomes a Problem

❗ 1. The market distrusts very low prices

If it’s too cheap, people assume it’s a scam or an unstable product.

There’s a psychological trust threshold.

❗ 2. Competition makes everything more expensive

Getting user attention is the biggest hidden cost.

And who wins this competition?

The companies that can spend more and they can spend more because they earn more.

In the end, there’s a paradox:

Technically, SaaS could be cheap — but the market and competition push prices up.