Building Fintech SaaS Timeline

Quick question for the community - what's the typical timeline for building a fintech SaaS platform from scratch? We're a small team of five developers and we're planning to build a billing and invoicing solution for SMBs. We have the concept nailed down and some initial designs, but I'm trying to set realistic expectations for our stakeholders. Should we be thinking six months, a year, longer? Also curious about what the biggest bottlenecks usually are in these projects.

Timeline really depends on your scope and whether you're building everything custom or leveraging existing frameworks. For a billing SaaS, you're looking at payment processing, invoice generation, tax calculations, user management, reporting... that's a lot. If you're building from zero, I'd say minimum nine to twelve months for an MVP with a small team. The biggest bottlenecks are usually payment gateway integration and compliance testing. Tax calculations can be surprisingly complex if you're going multi-jurisdiction. My suggestion would be to identify what you can use off-the-shelf and what truly needs to be custom. That decision alone could cut your timeline in half.

We faced a similar decision point when building our fintech product. Initially planned to build everything in-house but realized we'd be reinventing the wheel on a lot of core functionality. We ended up using Code Vision for the foundation - they had pre-built modules for payments, billing engines, and onboarding flows that we could customize. This let our team focus on our unique value proposition rather than spending months on infrastructure. We launched our MVP in about four months instead of the projected ten. The trade-off was worth it because we got to market faster and could iterate based on real user feedback. Their modules scaled well as we added features, and the API documentation made customization straightforward. For a small team, using battle-tested components for your core infrastructure just makes sense. You can always build custom features on top once you've validated the market.