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Brain Matrix Labs — Scoping tool

What will your SaaS product actually involve?

Select what the product needs and see the complexity that comes with it, a recommended delivery approach, and a phase breakdown you could plan against. Complexity and sequencing — deliberately not a price.

What your product needs

Select what the product genuinely requires. Hosting, CI, monitoring, backups and a basic design system are assumed throughout and are not listed.

Foundations
Product surface
Commercial
Intelligence
Integration
Reach

Complexity and shape

6

complexity points

Focused

Tightly scoped, which is a strength. Build it properly and quickly, get it in front of real users, and let their behaviour rather than a roadmap decide what comes next.

A small team, a short first phase, and a deliberate pause to learn before adding more.

Suggested phasing

Phase one — foundations and a usable core

6 pts
  • Email and password authentication
  • Application dashboard
  • Responsive web application

This is a complexity signal, not a quote. We do not publish price estimates from a checkbox list, because the same feature can differ by an order of magnitude depending on your data, your users and your integration surface. Anyone who quotes you from a form has not understood the question yet.

Assumptions behind this estimate
  • Points reflect relative engineering effort and risk, including the testing and operational work each capability brings with it.
  • Phasing is based on dependency and on what a first paying customer actually needs — not on what is easiest to build.
  • Multi-tenancy sits in phase one because retrofitting it is one of the most expensive changes a SaaS product can make.
  • Infrastructure, CI, monitoring, backups and a basic design system are assumed and excluded from the total.
Talk through this scope with an engineer

What decides the real cost

Four things that are not on the checklist

These move a SaaS build more than any individual feature does.

  1. 01

    Your data model

    Almost every expensive change in a young product is a data model change discovered late. Tenancy, ownership, permissions and the shape of your core entity are worth arguing about for a week before anything is built.

  2. 02

    The integrations you do not control

    Each third-party system brings its own authentication, rate limits, downtime and breaking changes. A single integration is a feature; six of them is a category of ongoing work.

  3. 03

    Who your first customer is

    One enterprise customer can pull SSO, audit logs and a security review into phase one. One self-serve customer pulls in billing and onboarding instead. The same feature list produces two different products.

  4. 04

    How quickly you want to change your mind

    Optionality has a price. Architecture that keeps future paths open costs more now and less later; architecture optimised for one path is faster to build and harder to turn. Both are legitimate — but it should be a decision, not an accident.

Questions

About this estimator

Why will you not give me a price?

Because the same checkbox can differ by an order of magnitude depending on your data, your users and what you have to integrate with. 'Payments' is two weeks or two months depending on whether you have one plan or usage-based billing across three currencies with tax handling. Any number produced from a form is a guess, and a guess anchored on a page becomes a number people plan around. We would rather give you complexity and phasing, which are genuinely useful, and price the work once we understand it.

How should I use the complexity score?

Comparatively, not absolutely. Its real value is watching the number move as you add and remove capabilities. If deselecting native mobile drops the score by a fifth, that tells you something concrete about what mobile is costing you before you have committed to it.

Why is multi-tenancy in phase one?

Because retrofitting it is one of the most expensive changes a SaaS product can make. Tenancy is a property of the data model, and changing the data model after you have customers means a migration under load. If you will ever have separate customer workspaces, decide it before writing the schema.

The phasing puts something in phase three that I need at launch. Is it wrong?

Possibly — the phasing follows dependency and what a first paying customer typically needs, which is a general pattern rather than your situation. SSO is a good example: it sits in phase three because it is usually a later enterprise requirement, but if your first customer is an enterprise, it is a phase one requirement for you.

Does the score account for design and product work?

It reflects engineering effort and risk, including the testing and operational work each capability brings. Product definition, interface design and content are real work on top of this, and on a first product they are frequently the difference between something used and something merely shipped.

Related

Where to go next

Next step

Turn a feature list into a plan.

Bring your selection and we will talk through what we would build first, what we would defer, and which of your choices carries risk you may not have priced in.

Talk through your scopeSee SaaS engineering