Why Building SaaS Is Still So Hard in 2026

Several years ago, I’m been working on a B2B2C platform from the scratch, we took about 2 months to build the MVP with about 8 engineers, including the backend, frontend, mobile apps and DevOps. It grew to millions of users before I left.

Today, I’m building a SaaS platform again for running LLM agents, and I realized that building SaaS is still so hard, authentication, authorization, billing, multi-tenancy, observability and so on, and I haven’t talked about the scalability and reliability yet. Although we may not build everything from the scratch, but still spending a lot of time and effort to integrate them into a cohesive system. Like us, we worked on our platform for months before releasing the MVP (more than MVP since we have to support SoC2 compliance), we also outsourced some of the components with the hope that we can focus on the core value of our product, but still longer than we expected.

I realized there’re some products like Base44 and Replit which can help with this, and I really like the feature to integrate with different services like stripe, supabase or slack. However, as a developer, I hope to control the whole stack, including the infrastructure, especially when you have some clients with high security requirements. Maybe I’m not the target audience of these products.

So I’m really surprised that there’s no framework today to help developers build SaaS products. I think the framework should at least integrate with different providers either by terraform or pulumi or other IaC tools for deployment. It should have the CI/CD pipeline build-in for quick iterations and provide a set of best practices and patterns for building SaaS products, like authentication, authorization, multi-tenancy and so on. People can use whatever code agents they like to build the business logic while using the framework to handle the common concerns and infrastructure.

It will be really time-saving and scalable if we have such a framework, and I hope it’s open-source.

A bit more thoughts about building SaaS products. Before if we want to test the frontend, we usually hire a qa engineer to write test cases and run the tests, but now since code is usually written and reviewed by agents, we rarely have a qa engineer especially for startups who has limited budget. Can we hire users as our qa engineers? They just need to screenshot the issues and report them in the frontend, if it’s a really bug, the agent will fix it and deploy a new version, the user will be rewarded with credits or even tokens, it’s a win-win for both sides.

We should rethink how to build SaaS products in the era of LLM agents.