A client gave me a requirements document for a production-ready event website SaaS aimed at weddings, christenings, birthdays, and corporate events. The platform would let paying hosts create an event site by choosing themes, colors, fonts, names, dates, venues, stories, cover images, and photo galleries. Each event would have a public URL and QR code that acts as the invitation.
Hosts could build and preview sites for free, then pay a one-time fee to publish them. There would be three pricing tiers, with additional features in the higher tiers. The dashboard would include guest and RSVP management, manual guest entry, CSV import/export, real-time dashboard and email notifications, optional SMS notifications, and a drag-and-drop seating chart based on confirmed guests.
The platform would also support gift or cash contributions through Stripe Connect, including host KYC onboarding, card payments, commission calculations, and payouts to each host's bank account. Other requirements include optional AI photo touch-ups through the Gemini API, maps and directions, calendar integration, hotel suggestions, taxi links, background music, a save-the-date mode, analytics, and proper VAT invoicing for corporate customers.
Guests would use a mobile-friendly public page without creating an account. They could view the event story, photos, countdown, and location; RSVP through a form or WhatsApp; contribute to the gift fund; and upload photos to a shared gallery.
The client expects polished themes, fast mobile pages, GDPR compliance, and reliable processing so that RSVPs and payments are not lost. They also want a proposal for hosting and operating costs at roughly 50–200 active event sites.
I work solo in the EU, where comparable agency rates are around €35–45 per hour. I have completed large projects before, but this scope is significantly bigger than anything I have estimated. What would be a realistic hour and price range, and how should I approach the client about narrowing the scope or sharing a budget?
4 Answers
A few hundred hours would be an optimistic estimate for the full scope. Stripe Connect and host KYC can take 40–50 hours on their own if you have not implemented them before. The seating-chart editor, payment retry and queue handling, notifications, guest photo uploads, GDPR work, testing, and polished themes add up quickly. A realistic production-grade estimate is probably 350–500+ hours, and potentially more if the client expects everything listed at launch. At €35–45 per hour, that is roughly €12,000–€22,500 before allowing for project management, revisions, launch support, and contingency.
Make the estimate explicit about assumptions and exclusions. Include design, technical architecture, infrastructure, third-party services, QA, accessibility, GDPR documentation, deployment, monitoring, support, and changes to requirements. Hosting at this scale may be modest compared with development, but payment processing, email, SMS, image storage, AI usage, monitoring, backups, and support should be listed as ongoing operating costs rather than hidden inside the build quote.
I would present this as a staged product rather than promising the entire requirements document at once. Phase one could include event creation, a few themes, public pages, RSVP management, basic notifications, and publishing. Defer seating charts, guest galleries, WhatsApp integration, AI editing, SMS, analytics, corporate invoicing, and the more complex payment flows until the core product is validated. Ask the client what budget and launch date they have, then map the highest-priority features to that constraint.
This is much more than a normal website. It is a multi-tenant SaaS product with payments, payouts, identity verification, messaging, file uploads, analytics, invoicing, and reliability requirements. I would avoid giving a single fixed quote before breaking it into phases and defining the minimum viable product.
That is much higher than the rough number I initially had in mind, but the breakdown makes sense. The payment and seating features especially seem easy to underestimate.