Starting a SaaS company is cheaper than you might think.

Of course, you need a good idea to fix a pain point for your future customers, and of course, you need to build the product, but many other topics can be covered easily.

Free & cheap resources to get you started:

UI & Design:

Not many developers are great at designing UIs, and that's okay.

Luckily there are CSS frameworks that will give your app a lot of visual structure from day one.
Bootstrap
Foundation
Material
Bulma

If you need more flexibility:
Tailwind

Visuals:

Stock footage can be quite expensive, but there are free resources too.

For stock photos:
unsplash .com

For stock videos:
pexels .com

And for really nice illustrations I always recommend this open-source collection made by @NinaLimpi
undraw .co

Code:

When you are building a product, you really don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Most of your app logic is available in the open-source space.

You want to focus on the pieces that are relevant to your domain.

A plethora of projects:
github .com
gitlab .com

Infrastructure:

These providers make generous gifts to deploy your app on their cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
DigitalOcean
Azure
Netlify
Vercel

You can run your product for free for a long time. Isn't that amazing?

Domains:

You can get your new domain for under 10$ a year.
There are many cheap providers out there, like these ones:

namecheap .com
godaddy .com

Just make sure you pick a company that will give you complete freedom to manage your DNS settings.
Very important!

Application Monitoring:

When your backend service crashes you can always check the logs (I hope you have them ).

But when your frontend has a bug the user will just leave the page and never tell you about it.

Start collecting errors & stack traces:
sentry .io

Emails:

Emails are a crucial part of any SaaS product.

From the first welcome and the password reset process to your product-specific content, a lot of emails need to be sent.

Trust me, you don't want to run your own email server:
mailgun .com
sendgrid .com

Support:

When your customer struggles, you need to provide an accessible way to get in touch with you.

What better way than a (near) live chat?

Here's a nice integration that is for free and will increase your customer satisfaction:
crisp .chat

There's so much more out there that you can have for free or little money.

You don't need a factory, 50 employees on day one, or expensive machines.

Just your time, a laptop, and an idea.
Take advantage of all those great offerings.

Now, get started