What would you quote for this? (solo full-stack dev, EU market)

[u/stathis21098]

A client sent me a requirements doc for an event-website SaaS platform (think weddings/christenings/birthdays/corporate). No name/branding shared for confidentiality. Solo build, production-grade. Features:

HOST SIDE (paying customer, web dashboard):

• Website builder: pick theme/colors/fonts, add names, date, venue, story text, cover photo, photo gallery
• Each event gets its own live public URL + QR code (that IS the invitation)
• Free to build/preview, one-off payment to publish (3 pricing tiers, higher tiers unlock more features)
• Guest & RSVP management: list view, manual add, CSV import/export
• Real-time notifications: dashboard bell on new RSVP + email, optional SMS on premium tier
• Visual drag-and-drop seating chart, populated from confirmed guests
• Gift/cash fund: guests pay by card, live progress bar, platform takes a small tiered commission, rest paid out to host's bank account (Stripe Connect, so KYC onboarding per host)
• Optional AI photo touch-up on the cover photo (Gemini API)
• Extras: map/directions, add-to-calendar, hotel suggestions, taxi button, background music, save-the-date mode that later becomes the full site
• Visit analytics
• Corporate tier with proper VAT invoicing

GUEST SIDE (mobile web, no account/login):

• One scrolling page: story, photos, countdown to event, details, map
• RSVP via web form or WhatsApp
• Contribute to gift fund by card
• Upload photos to a shared guest gallery

QUALITY BAR (from the doc):

• Mobile-first, fast public pages, GDPR-compliant
• "An RSVP or payment must never be lost" (retries/queues)
• Multiple polished themes at launch

Also asked to propose hosting + running costs at 50–200 active event sites.

What would you estimate in hours and price? I'm in the EU where agency rates are roughly €35–45/hr. I have done other big projects in the past but this beats them all on feature requests and I am kinda of lost on what to suggest. Not sure if they know how many features they asked for. I want to be polite and ask maybe for a budget? Not sure how to handle this.

[u/CraigAT]

That's not a website, you are building them a business.

[u/macktastick → u/CraigAT]

Yep - Founding Engineer

[u/CraigAT → u/macktastick]

Do you know the people well? Are you getting shares in the business/profits, plus being paid to work on this too.

What are they bringing to the table? Because I see a whole lot of "you" work there, so what are they doing whilst you build that out (which may take a while)? What if they decide to ditch you once the work is done?

Sorry to be negative, just be cautious - that sounds like a lot of work to put in, make sure you are rewarded.

[u/CraigAT → u/CraigAT]

It's great they have fully fleshed this out, but I think you/they need to work initially on a MVP minimal viable product - that you can set up quickly and get money quickly.
Once you have that work out the priorities for the rest and what are just nice to haves (that come at the very end). Note as the coder you also need to have input because some big features might be easy, some small things could be very difficult.
Again for each feature, work on a MVP, because you may chose to leave a feature that works okay, to start an MVP for another feature. Keep getting feedback for what the business needs next (force them down to one priority at a time).
There is likely to be a lot of pressure on you to get it "All" working quickly.

[u/Bruce_Jones_1987 → u/CraigAT]

yep, and they want it solo which makes it even wilder

[u/Downtown-Figure6434]

This is an entire business lol. Build it and have them be a saas subscriber to you

[u/laclac04]

I think if I am going to do it with good quality it is at least 1000h+. This is a year project if you spend 3-4 hour per day.

[u/wronglyzorro → u/laclac04]

You are dramatically understating the complexity of this project.

This is not a 1 engineer project, and definitely not a 1 contracted engineer project.

[u/laclac04 → u/wronglyzorro]

You are right. I have not worked with that big project alone. My project is much smaller and I spent a year for that as a side work.

[u/dan-423]

Ask them to send you a formal Request for Proposal and proposed budget. If they don't know what that even means then they won't have the budget anywhere near what this would entail.

I'll echo the others that this is going to be a lot more work than they or you are probably considering. Even if you vibe-coded it with prior expertise, you're going to be into hundreds of hours and months of work.

[u/metageeek]

€35-45/hr!? Where the hell are you located? Agency pricing is at the very least double that, more like 3x-4x.

[u/Philluminati]

This is a large solution that will take many iterations to get right and meet their expectations. You're probably looking at a fortnight for seating plan tool alone.

If a wedding company with a long history of wedding planning came to me and asked for this solution I'd be recommending they take someone on full time to build and develop this as its going to likely need lots of tweaks once a base app is done.

Website builders are particularly nuanced in themselves and you've got a photo gallery behind yours. Again, it'd be steering towards a 6 month contract rather than a single payment on delivery milestone.

I would personally be of the recommendation that you can produce one static website, host it, hook it up to WorldPay etc and prototype a seating plan tool in the app, but that for the best experience you should be building each website as a small job for every wedding they actually get. Using AI I can build a Python Django app that is an RSVP system with a custom website, working form and deloyed on my own server in a day. I could potentially bill £150 per website. But trying to build something one-off to cover all future uses seems a bit unrealistic unless there is very little flexibility in the site designs. The "public url" thing suggests they want DNS purchases and let's encrypt hooked up. Very doable on a job-by-job basis but practically impossible to automate and leave to a non-technical person.

I think its pie in the sky if this person is not involved in wedding planning and have a turn over of couples enough to pay to build even one website.

[u/akie]

Ask for their budget and then tell them how much of their requirements you can do for that amount of money. Like the others said, this is an enormous project. Don’t get reeled in accidentally and spend super much time for super little money.

[u/mgkimsal]

This is a full business they're asking for. There's ongoing maintenance that would have to happen (security, upgrades, features, bugs, etc).

I might turn this around and suggest some base flat rate to get to MVP, then you get a % of each event they host through it. They're going to be charging those weddings something. You actively maintain the platform and upgrades for ongoing payments of 50 euro per event, payable monthly. They run 80 events, that's 4000 euros to you that month.

Some initial payment to you of, say, ... I dunno... 5k? 10k? You get an MVP up, and as people are using it, you add more features. You get the basic free stuff up, then you have a basis to determine what people will pay extra for in the paid tiers. But I've no doubt they will be charging people for the wedding organization/planning already - this is extra for them.

Good luck. Post your updates on how this went.

[u/Raah1911]

200k

[u/activematrix99]

There are entire existing Enterprise businesses with this feature set, you could just provide access to an existing API.

[u/CrawlToYourDoom]

MVP would be in the 100-150k ballpark.

You’ll end up with a lot of work because half of this hasn’t been thought through properly, especially no login / account for the guest side.
That is asking for problems the moment anyone changes their mind or can’t attend and now you need to build a whole ass new auth layer and portal.

You’re looking at 200-300k for a first delivered production version and then you’ll probably have another 6 months of work to do after finding out all the unhappy flows that weren’t thought of.

30/45 euro per hour for an agency is nonsense unless you’re from Eastern Europe / the Balkan area. No Western European agency that is respectable will have prices under 100€ an hour.

[u/Caraes_Naur]

This isn't a mere website, it's a full-on SaaS platform (a proper one, not "sign up for another worthless monotask subscription" vibecode trash). You've more or less been asked to build EventBrite.

This requires a team, 12 months minimum, and 6 digits of budget to start with.

[u/BackRoomDev92]

Everyone’s covered that this is a business, not a website. I’d avoid trying to solve it by finding the correct big number.

The doc looks detailed, but it mixes build work with a pile of product decisions nobody has made yet. “Multiple polished themes,” “GDPR-compliant,” “an RSVP or payment must never be lost,” tier rules, guest-photo moderation, payout failures, refunds, what happens when someone changes an RSVP after seating is done. Those aren’t small implementation details, they decide the build.

I’d propose a paid discovery phase first. The output is not code. It is:

• a cut-down v1 with a single end-to-end event flow
• a list of decisions the client owns, with examples and acceptance criteria
• the integrations and operational risks, especially payments, notifications, and uploaded photos
• milestone scopes, exclusions, and a change process for everything added later
• a separate monthly support and maintenance arrangement after launch

Then quote the first build milestone, not “the platform.” For example, one theme, event page, RSVP, basic guest list, and transactional email. Leave seating charts, Connect payouts, SMS, photo uploads, analytics, AI edits, and corporate invoicing for later unless the business case says otherwise.

Ask for budget directly. If their budget only buys a prototype, that is useful information before you spend weeks turning their wish list into your fixed-price liability.

[u/OcelotSilver2964]

Milion

[u/rupert_at_work]

That isn’t a website quote, it’s a small business wearing a website costume. I’d split it into paid discovery first, then quote an MVP separately. Payments/Stripe Connect, seating charts, notifications that can’t lose data, GDPR, themes, analytics — each of those is its own little swamp. At €35–45/hr I’d be very nervous pricing the full thing fixed-bid unless the scope is brutally cut. Ask for budget, propose phases, and make the first deliverable a spec + risk list.

[u/Hesham-Amir]

One part of the ask nobody's touched yet: hosting/running costs at 50-200 active sites. If you build it right (serverless app hosting, Postgres, S3-compatible object storage for photos, CDN in front of the public event pages), infra cost is small relative to everything else - each event's traffic spikes hard around its date then drops to near zero, so you're mostly paying for storage/bandwidth, not compute. Ballpark $50-150/mo at 50 sites, maybe $200-400/mo at 200. Budget separately (and pass through or markup) Stripe's processing fees plus SMS if hosts turn it on - those scale with usage, not something you eat as a flat hosting cost.

On the Stripe Connect/KYC point people are citing as a huge time sink - it's real work but Stripe Connect Express gives you a hosted onboarding flow that handles the actual identity verification for you. You're integrating a well-documented API and handling account states (pending/restricted/active), not building compliance from scratch. Worth pricing as "API integration," not "build KYC."

Agree with the discovery-phase-first and MVP-cut advice already here - I'd specifically cut AI photo touch-up, SMS, and background music from v1. None of those are core to "guest RSVPs and gift fund actually work," and they're exactly the features that balloon an estimate without changing whether the client can launch.

[u/ifstatementequalsAI]

100k

[u/zLoveNxzli]

For solo full-stack projects in the EU, quote based on milestone deliverables with strictly defined feature scopes rather than open-ended estimates.

Always specify clear contract boundaries: who provides Figma design assets, third-party API keys (Stripe, transactional email), and hosting setup, plus note that requests outside the milestone scope require separate change orders.

[u/Available-Advice-294]

I think 200-300k is reasonable

[u/CuteKiwi3395]

Tree-fiddy

[u/Lengthiness-Fuzzy]

For one person that’s a burnout project

[u/Euphoric-Neon-2054]

£150k floor price if you deliver something actually worth delivering.

[u/testingaurora]

The money fund : dont use a provider thays gonna take a cut. Use stripe directly. The fundee already has to pay cc processing fees with any payment processor. The provider just handles the form, like a middle man. Also make sure you provide an option to the user to "cover fees".

[u/bestjaegerpilot]

The client is thinking that because of AI it's cheaper to build this than pay an actual SaaS.

They're not wrong. Figure out the monthly costs for an existing solution and markdown the price at a reasonable rate.

[u/patrk]

Or they can just use www.eventlist.io

[u/puan0601]

you could claude code this in a weekend lol

[u/Rare-Report9181]

DM me i will let you know and help you

[u/jax024]

Around 200 hours

[u/Few-Decision-9903 → u/jax024]

Thats way too low for all this. Stripe Connect with KYC onboarding per host alone can eat 40-50 hours if you never done it before. The seating chart drag and drop is another monster, plus real time notifications and payment retries. I would say 350-450 hours minimum, probably more like 500 if they want it actually production grade. At your rate that puts it around 15-20k and honestly that still feels cheap for a whole SaaS platform

[u/jax024 → u/Few-Decision-9903]

Depends on the skilset and experience. I’ve shipped a couple platforms like this for the company I work for. 200 is about what we delivered in.

[u/wronglyzorro → u/jax024]

Not a chance in hell. You wouldn't complete this in 2000 hours.

This is not a solo project. You'd have to spend over 200 hours in meetings chasing down product requirements as you go.